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The Daily Dot, the Austin-based website dedicated to covering all things Internet, announced yesterday that it had raised significant private funding. The New York Observer, citing unnamed sources, is reporting the company raised about $10 million from another media company.
Eschewing venture capital, The Daily Dot has focused its energies on finding private investors it believes will allow the company to grow.
“That’s because we are first and foremost a journalistic enterprise, which could be compromised by venture funding,” Daily Dot CEO Nicholas White said on the company’s blog. “We are here to illuminate the deepest corners of the Internet and to inform the public about them.”
In fact, White goes on lambasting the VC funding game as an “A, B, C, D game of unicorn horn-measuring.” It’s an amusing and interesting post you can find here.
The Daily Dot’s latest round of funding is expected to be used to hire more staff, develop more digital content and help the company build out its in-house creative agency. The company currently employs 25 people in its Austin offices and another 60 elsewhere – most new hires are going to be in the editorial, social program, engineering and video production departments.
The company positions itself as a community newspaper covering the Internet. It reports on memes and viral Internet content the same way a local newspaper would. If you don’t want to miss anything that happens on the Web, this is the place to go and, as the importance of the web has grown, so too has The Daily Dot.
The company started in 2011 in Austin with a budget of just $600,000, publishing stories directly to Facebook and Twitter. As the publication grew they started a team in New York who worked out of a coffee shop in Brooklyn. Today the company employs about 85 people and has real office spaces in both New York and Austin.
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