BuzzFeed Announces $20 Million in New Financing

BuzzFeed, the social news Web site that was one of the media industry darlings of 2012, began the new year by announcing Thursday morning that it had raised nearly $20 million in new financing from its investors.

With the infusion of capital the company will hire more employees, try to strengthen its presence on mobile phones and potentially add international flavors of its Web site.

Jonah Peretti, the site's founder and chief executive said in a statement: “We have the senior management, board, and investors we need to build the next great media company: socially native, tech enabled, with massive scale. We are all focused on that big goal and raised this capital to move even faster.”

Indeed, it was just a year ago that BuzzFeed hired Ben Smith, a star reporter from Politico, to be its editor in chief, and raised $15.5 million in venture capital financing. Money from that round, its Series C round, essentially h asn't been touched yet - the site's traffic and revenue growth has helped to pay for some of the now 70 reporters and editors the site employs. But the board of BuzzFeed wanted to invest more now.

The Series D round, totaling $19.3 million, was led by New Enterprise Associates. All of the investors who participated in prior rounds invested more this time, including RRE Ventures, Hearst Interactive Media, SoftBank, and Lerer Ventures. The company announced two new investors on Thursday, Michael and Kass Lazerow, the co-founders of Buddy Media.

“We think BuzzFeed will be one of the great media companies of the next decade,” Patrick Kerins, a board member who led the round for New Enterprise Associates, said in a statement.

BuzzFeed has been around since 2006, but it gained attention last year for hiring Mr. Smith and several other young, Web-savvy reporters and editors. Its mix of political scoops, links to viral videos and easy-to-digest lists (“23 Adorable Photos of…” “17 Things You Should Know About…”) has been both praised as a model for the future of online publishing and lampooned by skeptics.

Mr. Peretti told David Carr last year that the site is a natural response to a changing Web world. “As the world has realigned from being about portals and then search and now social, how do you build a media company for a social world?” he said. “And a big part of that is scoops and exclusives and original content, and it's also about cute kittens in an entertaining cultural context.”