14 DAY TRIAL // Tumblr has announced a massive new funding round, raising $85 million, 63 million Euro, at an estimated valuation of at least $800 million, 590 million Euro. It's the biggest sum the site has ever raised and it says the money will help it fuel the growth it's been seeing in recent years, in the past year in particular.
The blogging site has some impressive stats to share, along with the announcement of the funding round, which should explain why it needed the money and also why it got it.
"This year alone, we’ve grown from 2 to 13 billion pageviews a month, with tremendous international adoption. Mobile pageviews have increased 17 times during that period," Tumblr commented on the funding
"And the 30 million blogs on Tumblr now generate more than 40 million posts per day, passing 10 billion total posts just two weeks ago," it said.
"This year our little team has grown from 15 to 50, and it is incredibly important to us that we work with partners who understand our vision and share our ambition to build the best platform for the most creative people in the world," it added.
The funding round was led by Greylock Partners. John Lilly, a partner at the VC firm and the former CEO of Mozilla praised Tumblr's growth but also its viral nature, the fact that contents gets shared and spread so fast on the site.
Other investors are Insight Venture Partners, the Chernin Group, Spark Capital, Union Square Ventures and Sequoia Capital as well as Richard Branson.
Tumblr has 72 million unique visitors each month, but the really impressive stat is the page view count which greatly outweighs its visitors count. At 13 billion page views per month, it's competing with some of the biggest sites out there.
It's a lot bigger than Twitter for example and even manages to beat Wikipedia, which has close to 500 million unique visitors each month.