NEWS
NEWS
NEWS
Email newsletter provider theSkimm raises $6.25 million Series A
Email newsletter provider theSkimm Inc. has closed a Series A round of $6.25 million led by RRE Ventures LLC, Homebrew Management LLC and Greycroft Partners LLC. Also participating in the round were Chelsea Handler and Irving Azoff.
The New York-based startup was founded by former NBC employees Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin in 2012 and offers a daily email described by the company as simplifying the headlines for the educated professional who knows enough to know she needs more.
Celebrity fans of the service include Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon, the New York Times reported.
The company is primarily focused on providing a summary of the daily news to 20-30 year old woman, more commonly known as millennials. The newsletter offers a diverse range of daily news stories covering politics, international affairs, gossip, sports, entertainment, finance, and more.
“We launched theSkimm because we could not ignore a big void in the market — we saw that our friends, who are highly educated and very busy, were not engaging with news in a way they enjoyed, fit into their routine, or made them keep coming back for more” the founders wrote in a post November. “As news producers, we knew we could fix this and had the passion to take it on. So we gave theSkimm a voice that would cut through the noise and that our target audience could connect with, using a delivery mechanism — email — that they already use daily.”
The company has some remarkable stats for a young startup; the company had over 100,000 subscribers in its first year and is believed to be significantly bigger today, but more notably delivers an extremely high open rate exceeding 45 percent versus the industry average of 16.4 percent.
TheSkimm makes its money through promotional links in its emails and is reported to currently be working with over 80 companies.
Email newsletters do seem to be old school in 2014, but there have been highly successful email newsletters previously; Comcast Corp. acquired similarly female focused email newsletter DailyCandy for $125 million in 2008. One of Daily Candy’s founders is on the advisor team to theSkimm.
With the new round theSkimm plans to expand its existing team with an emphasis on hiring staff members who can assist in building new products.
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