OpenWeb, a tech startup that helps major publishers like Hearst and HuffPost more easily interact with their audience, announced this week it has reached unicorn valuation thanks to a $150 million investment led by Insight Venture Partners and Georgian. Several major names in media and venture funding, including the New York Times and Entrée Capital, have also come on as strategic investors.
Founded in 2012, OpenWeb licenses its technology to publishers as a way to help them moderate user comments. Since then, it has partnered with some of the industry’s leading players, and claims to have more than 100 million monthly active users.
As audience engagement continues to grow more and more intertwined with publishers’ bottom-line, OpenWeb is entering a new phase of growth, according to a recent blog post. The startup says it plans to use this fresh funding to create a “safer, democratized alternative” to existing social media platforms and provide publishers with the tools they need to build “strong, first-party relationships” with their audiences — a service that will grow even more crucial as the internet phases out cookies.
“Publishers have been impacted by big tech and will need to leverage data to win. OpenWeb provides this solution by utilizing AI and machine learning to incentivize healthy dialogue, decrease toxicity, and create thriving, engaged communities,” Jeff Horing, a managing director at Insight Partners, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, OpenWeb’s co-founder and CEO Nadav Shoval said in a recent LinkedIn post that this is “only the beginning,” adding that the company is “committed to [its] mission of improving online conversations and empowering the media industry to own their relationships with their audiences.”
In the meantime, OpenWeb also says it plans to grow its team both in NYC and in new offices in Canada, Asia and Europe. The company currently has more than 20 open tech positions available now.
