Jan 18, 2011 11:43 GMT  ·  By

The Cheezburger Network, the company behind popular site such as I Can Has Cheezburger and Fail Blog, has just raised a significant amount of money from venture capital investors. The blog network raised $30 million from a number of big players which will be used to fund an accelerated growth period.

While the company is four years old, this is the first round of institutional funding since Cheezburger has been profitable from the start.

The Foundry Group lead the round with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures and SoftBank Capital also participating.

Cheezburger started in 2007 with the acquisition of the I Can Has Cheezburger blog, which dealt with the very popular LOLcats meme. With just $2.25 million in angel funding, founder Ben Huh set about creating one of the biggest niche blog networks around.

After the first acquisition, it kept on adding new blogs to the networks, snatching them up as they started to become popular. Cheezburger relied on the initial funding and the revenue it generated to pay for the bills and acquire new blogs.

It's been making money from advertising, the obvious choice, but also from book publishing and merchandise. The revenue meant that the company could fund itself and didn't have to raise any money as it grew.

The blog network gets about 16.5 million monthly visitors and generates about 375 million page views. It also serves some 110 million videos each month. What's more, 500,000 new photos or videos are uploaded every month.

At this point though, it seems that Ben Huh is determined to grow the network even faster and this is where the funding will come in handy. The first order of business will be to hire more engineers to keep the expanding network working smoothly. The company was already looking to add about 20 to 30 new jobs by the end of the year, but it's plans are now bigger.