Scribd Raises $22 Million Funding Round to Expand its Book Subscription Service
Entrepreneur Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures to Join Board
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 5, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Scribd, the leading subscription book service, today announced that it has closed a $22 million financing led by Khosla Ventures with reinvestment from existing backers including Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. Seasoned entrepreneur Keith Rabois will join Scribd's board as a board observer. This brings Scribd's total funding to date up to $48M.
"We had a fantastic 2014 at Scribd. We launched audiobooks with 30,000 titles from publishers like Blackstone and Scholastic. We also doubled our e-Book titles, adding content from 1,000+ publishers - including Big 5 publishers Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster - along with industry leaders like Harlequin, Houghton Mifflin, Lonely Planet, Perseus and Wiley," said Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Scribd. "This new funding round will enable us to work towards achieving our goal of creating the most comprehensive library of the future for our millions of users around the world."
Scribd, which launched in 2007, now has more than 80M monthly readers accessing their books and documents worldwide. The new capital resources raised will be used to reinvest in the business to further accelerate hiring, content acquisition efforts and international expansion. Since the launch of the company's subscription book service in October 2013, the subscriber base has grown an average of 31% per month. Scribd readers have spent more than 17M hours reading half a million premium e-books and have logged 180,000 listening hours in the first 60 days since launching its audiobooks service.
"The subscription model has already transformed the way we consume content like film and music, and Scribd is doing the same with books," said Rabois, partner at Khosla Ventures. "I look forward to working with the Scribd team to scale their product to a massive global audience."
Over the past year, Scribd has seen a steady increase in subscribers each month, consistently landing the company in the top-5 reading apps in both the Apple App Store and Google Play. Scribd is available on iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Nook tablets and the web.
About Scribd
Scribd is the premier subscription book service with more than half a million e-books and 30K audiobooks, including New York Times bestsellers, Pulitzer Prize winners and reader favorites across every genre. Launched in 2007 by founders Trip Adler and Jared Friedman and backed by Y Combinator, Charles River Ventures, Redpoint Ventures and Khosla Ventures, Scribd is one of the most influential websites in the world. It is available in nearly every country, featuring 62MM documents in +80 languages.
For more information, please visit www.scribd.com.
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SOURCE Scribd
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