Just about a month ago, visual blog aggregator Bloglovin announced it had taken an investment from New York Internet-company Betaworks and former Glam CFO and Microsoft executive Bruce Jaffe. Now, the Stockholm-based company says it has raised $ 1 million more from Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and other investors.
While this isn’t series A funding, CEO and co-founder Mattias Swenson said it’s a round to “speed things up, recruit more engineers and expand.”
The company’s first seed round was completed several years and wasn’t very large, he said. The announcement last month was made after Betaworks and Jaffe purchased that seed position from the original investors.
Betaworks participated in the $ 1 million round, along with Lerer Ventures, RRE Ventures, Hank P. Vigil & Fritz Lanman, Eric Martineau-Fortin, Rob Wiesenthal, Jill Greenthal, Kinnevik.
Bloglovin initially launched in 2007 as Bloggkoll (which is Swedish for “to keep track of blogs”) and was intended to help fashion enthusiasts keep up with content on their favorite blogs. But now, the company has more than 1.5 million members worldwide who use the site to follow blogs in all kinds of areas, from fashion and food to photography and interior design.
Similiar to an RSS reader, Bloglovin aggregates content from a variety blogs and bubbles the newest content to the top. But it displays the content in a Tumblr-esque, design-centric way and allows users to participate by “like”-ing the content they like best.
The last time we talked, Swenson said the company was on track to add about five more engineers and potentially a monetization hire by the end of the year. Today, he said the company’s hiring plan is unchanged for now but they have the financial flexibility to add even more if needed. In the near future, the company plans to focus on mobile and social and, Swenson said, add a New York presence.
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