Exclusive: Flipboard raising another $50 million
Flipboard said in September that it had raised $50 million. That was only half the story. — By Dan Primack and Jessi Hempel — FORTUNE — Social news app Flipboard is in final negotiations to raise $50 million in new venture capital funding, Fortune has learned.
Context & Ripple Effects
Flipboard has spent two years converting download momentum into a business: after confirming $50 million at a $200 million valuation back in 2011 and hitting 20 million users flipping three billion pages a month by mid-2012, it pushed onto Android and then the open web this year, reaching 75 million registered users. Fortune's Dan Primack and Jessi Hempel now report — unconfirmed until papers sign — that the $50 million Flipboard announced in September was only half the round, with final negotiations underway for another $50 million on top.
The size matters because of what the money has to buy: Flipboard's own reporting history shows a company deliberately hedging against platform gatekeepers, pivoting toward social catalogs and e-commerce in 2012 as Twitter squeezed outside developers, and building web-based editing tools so curation lives on its own domain rather than inside iOS.
First-order effects
- A second $50 million tranche would double Flipboard's Series C, extending the runway behind its 2013 push from mobile app to web-and-desktop publisher with 75 million registered users.
- Until negotiations close, Flipboard carries a rumored-but-unconfirmed round — the company confirmed the September $50 million but has not yet confirmed this second half.
Second-order effects
- Fresh capital lets Flipboard keep funding its post-Twitter-crackdown diversification — shopping catalogs, web editing tools — rather than depending on distribution controlled by the platforms that burned its developer peers.
- Rival social-reading services face a competitor that can outlast them on paid curation and brand advertising while burning less of its own equity per user than a smaller raise would allow.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, consumer content apps increasingly fund independence through repeated nine-figure private rounds instead of early exits — trading dilution for time to build revenue streams (advertising, commerce) that platforms cannot revoke.
- That structure quietly reshapes the category's endgame: fewer acquisitions of promising readers, longer private lives, and valuation pressure deferred rather than resolved.
The trend: Consumer reading and curation apps are raising ever-larger staged venture rounds to stay independent while they build platform-proof revenue, one tranche at a time.