Report: Flipboard raises $50M at $800M valuation

Steven Loeb · September 23, 2013 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3220

Flipboard has quadrupled its value since the last time it raised funding in 2011

There's so much news out there on the Internet that it can, frankly, be overwhelming. This is not a new observation, of course, and many startups and services have been around for a few years that help aggregate this information into something that is readable and accessible.

One of the most notable is mobile media magazine app Flipboard, which has just raised another $50 million in funding, according to a report from AllThingsD on Monday. The round was apparently led by Rizvi Traverse Management and Goldman Sachs.

This new funding would be on top of the $60.5 million the company already raised in two rounds of funding, bringing its total to $110.5 million. Previous investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer, Index Ventures, Insight Venture Partners, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, Ashton Kutcher, and The Chernin Group.

Even more impressive is that the company is now reportedly valued at $800 million, meaning that it has quadrupled that number since the last time it raised a funding round in 2011. 

VatorNews has reached out to Flipboard to confirm this news, but the company could not be reached for comment. We will upate if we learn more.

The Palo Alto-based Flipboard aggregates news from media feeds and social media websites, including both Twitter and Facebook. It takes all of those streams of data, and presents it in a magazine format that users can flip through.

The service is available Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, Korea, Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, U.S. and U.K.

Launched in 2010, Flipboard is one of the most popular new aggregators out there, having just recently announced that it now has 85 million registered users. But it has been seeing some steep competition with a number of companies buying up, or launching their own, news aggregate services.

Personalized iPad magazine Zite launched in March 2011, and was then bought by CNN that August. The New York Times launched its own aggregator called News.me, and the Washington Times launced its own personalized content aggregator, called Trove

More recently, Yahoo picked up Summly, a mobile app that uses an algorithm to generate summaries from thousands of news sources from around the Web, making reading the news easier and clearer. Yahoo has since intregated Summly into a new iOS app.

Even the social media sites are getting into it, with LinkedIn buying news aggregation app Pulse earlier this year. It was also reported this past summer that Facebook was looking to develop its own Flipboard-like reading app. 

With so much competition, Flipboard has been making moves recently to help it stay ahead.

In March it launched Flipboard 2.0, which began allowing users to collect, and save, articles in order to create their own magazines. In July the company, which had been mobile only since its creation, launched a Web version of the service as well. 

(Image source: https://flipboard.com)

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Flipboard

Startup/Business

Joined Vator on

The world's first social magazine. Flipboard is a fast, beautiful way to flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter. 

Inspired by the beauty and ease of print media, Flipboardʼs mission is to fundamentally improve how people discover, browse and share content across their social networks. 

http://www.flipboard.com/
http://twitter.com/flipboa rd

Zite

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Zite "personalized magazine" iPad app will be launching March 9th, 2011.  More information to follow.

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