14 DAY TRIAL // Tumblr has been getting plenty of attention lately, though not necessarily for the best of reasons. A 24 hour outage left quite a few people without their daily taste of their favorite blogs and raised questions about the company's ability to scale. But there is good news as well, Tumblr just closed a hefty funding round bringing in $30 million.
Tumblr has confirmed the funding round, which was rumored about a month ago, but didn't provide a figure in the announcement. The sum, revealed in a SEC filing, though, is at $30 million, as was estimated initially.
The company says the funding is welcome to fuel its impressive growth. Tumblr has had a great year with user numbers growing several times over. In fact, the blogging platform reveals that it now hosts 11 million blogs.
"What started as a fun experiment has grown into one of the largest networks on the web, serving billions of views across more than 11 million blogs," David Karp, Tumblr founder, wrote.
"It’s an unparalleled privilege to spend every single day building a product used by so many extraordinarily talented people," he said.
"Nonetheless, all of this new attention has led to some serious growing pains over the last few months. There’s never 100% optimism when we feel like we’ve let you down," he added.
Tumblr has been on a hiring spree lately and the site is confirming this. Tumblr says there are now five new engineers working for the company. But the company is still a rather small outfit, the plans are to expand the team to 20 employees, double what it had so far.
The company is also adding a second data center to handle the increasing load. Considering the recent day-long outage, that's probably a very smart idea.
"We strive to keep our company and infrastructure super-efficient, but growing this quickly isn’t particularly cheap. Tumblr is largely made possibly today by our extremely supportive investors, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures, as well as Sequoia Capital, who we’re thrilled to have joining us this month," Karp said about the funding.