Tumblr, one of the companies that significantly lowered the bar for starting a blog, has just raised $4.5 million in a Series B round led by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, the same investors that put in $750,000 in the first round. CEO David Karp says the investment will give the startup a runway of at least two and a half years, and is introducing paid features at the same time.
Furthermore, former Time Warner technology SVP (and current CEO of Betaworks) John Borthwick is joining the board, while former CNET director John Maloney will act as the New York-based company’s President.
Tumblr serves zero ads on its pages, and generated an equal amount of dollars so far. Now, Tumblr will have premium services to make up for that, although it’s unclear what the services will be exactly. Karp did mention they were gonna be ‘sexy’, so we’re moderately curious now.
In a release, Tumblr is claimed to have over 15 million monthly unique visitors, but those numbers sound a bit inflated if you ask us. ComScore measures 1.5 million global unique visitors in October, a 300 percent increase from a year ago (see chart). Nonetheless, it had great momentum from the moment it launched in 2007, and there’s still a lot of potential users out there. If they will continue to come, and if they will be able to make the company profitable, remains to be seen.
