Reddit, a San Francisco, CA-based social website that allows users to generate news links, closed a $50m round of funding.
The round was led by Sam Altman, with participation from Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jared Leto, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, Snoop Dogg, and Yishan Wong.
The company intends to use the funds to hire more staff for product development, expand the community management team, improve the moderation and community tools, and work with third party developers to expand its mobile offerings, improve its self-serve ad product, build out redditgifts marketplace, pay for its technical infrastructure.
Started by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian as a Y Combinator company, then continuing as a division of Conde Nast, and spun out three years ago as an independent entity, Reddit operates a web site collecting entries such as links or text posts submitted by its registered users. Content is divided into numerous categories, which are visible on the front page to new users and those who browse the site. When items are submitted, users can vote for or against them. The front page shows a combination of the highest-rated posts out of all the subreddits a user is subscribed to.
FinSMEs
01/10/2014