The money is invested by the generosity of a number of well recognized Silicon Valley investors, including companies like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and private investors like Y Combinator President Sam Altman also a board member and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. It also involves currency from the hedge fund Coatue, property firm Vy Capital and mutual fund giant Fidelity.
Advance Publications which holds Condé Nast, Reddit’s one-time origin company did not join in this funding round but yet owns a bulk stake in Reddit, according to two experts forward with the deal. Condé Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg remains on Reddit’s board of directors. News published last month that Reddit was accumulating more money.
Reddit, which advertises itself as the “front page of the internet,” has done a long-standing position for all kinds of online communities, both concrete and abrogating, since it was founded in 2005 by Huffman and co-founder Alexis Ohanian. It’s had a turbulent stretch since its last funding round when it increased $50 million in 2014. When Huffman turned to Reddit in the summer of 2015 between a user revolt, he grew the company’s third CEO in less than a year.
But people at Reddit have settled down since and one point that hasn’t shifted enough over the prior decade is Reddit’s product. The interface lets users post and discuss on links akin to an early internet chatroom, and has gathered 300 million regular visitors. But Reddit has also grasped its early internet functionality and appearance it still looks like a product that was designed for the internet in 2005.
Huffman’s plan for the new funding involves a redesign of reddit.com the organization is literally re-writing all of its code, some of which is longer than a decade old. An initial version of the new design, which we saw through our interview, looks related to Facebook’s News Feed or Twitter’s Timeline: A never-ending feed of content divided up into “cards” with more visuals to lure people into the discussions hidden underneath.
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