Flipboard has confirmed that it raised an additional $50 million, which will close out the Series C round of financing that it brought on in September. In addition to the new funding, Flipboard is also announcing that it has also surpassed the 100-million-user milestone.
The additional funding, which was first reported by Fortune, will also be led Rizvi Traverse Management, the investment fund run by under-the-radar Suhail Rizvi. The funding closed last week, according to a company spokesperson, and brings the total amount raised to more than $160 million.
Valuation was pegged at $800 million, which was only slightly below the $1 billion that had previously been rumored. Existing investors, which include Goldman Sachs, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Index Ventures, and Insight Venture Partners, also participated.
Flipboard’s raise comes as the company continues to add new users. The company now has more than 100 million users, which is up from 85 million, at the time that it confirmed the first half of the Series C funding.
It has also been working to give users more tools to build magazine-like feeds of their favorite pieces of content. In March, it launched the 2.0 version of its product, which unveiled the magazine feature. Soon after, it enabled users to share those custom feeds with their friends.
All of that was meant to attract more brand advertisers, which the company hopes will treat its content more like magazines, in terms of how much they’re willing to pay to reach Flipboard readers. By placing their ads in a clean, well-lit, and attractive space, the hope is that Flipboard can command higher premiums than one would find in a typical mobile app.
It took that one step further in November, when it launched tools to enable brands to build their own catalogs. Those catalogs are meant to evoke a better shopping (or at least browsing experience) than one would find on most e-commerce sites.
The strategy appears to be working so far. While Flipboard has declined to give out revenue numbers in the past, in November CEO Mike McCue told TechCrunch:
At a high level, the economics for ad deals on Flipboard near print, as opposed to digital CPMs – which has always been a goal of ours,” he says. “This kind of brand advertising sells for about the same as what it sells for in print pages in Vanity Fair.
To continue getting more advertisers on board, and to keep moving its product forward, Flipboard expects to hire pretty aggressively over the next year. The company has about 100 employees today, according to CTO Eric Feng, and expects that to double to 200 by the end of next year. Hires will be focused on engineering and adding to its sales team.
