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The following blog post is from Allen Lau, Wattpad’s co-founder and CEO, who has some great news to share.
Today I am super excited to announce a new round of funding for Wattpad, totalling $46 million. The round was led by OMERS Ventures, and we are excited to welcome new investors August Capital, Raine Ventures, and Northleaf Venture Catalyst Fund. All existing investors also participated in this round in a big way. We’re glad to continue to have the support of Union Square Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Jerry Yang of AME Cloud Ventures, Golden Venture Partners, and Boris Wertz of Version One Ventures.
At Wattpad we want to build a billion user community that connects people through reading and writing. We want to give people from every corner of the world free access to this community from the devices they already own. No matter what language you speak, we want you to find a story you want to read on Wattpad. This latest investment will allow Wattpad to realize this vision even faster.
We’ll use this latest round of funding to support product development and community growth. There are 25 million registered Wattpadders, and millions more join the community every month. Collectively, these people spend more than 6 billion minutes, monthly, on Wattpad, and we want to give them an amazing reading and writing experience. Together with our readers and writers, we will change the world in a positive way.
We will continue to expand our team in Toronto. In a few weeks we’ll move to a new downtown office space that will better accommodate our rapid growth. Toronto is one of the most diverse cities in the world and is home to some of the best technical talent. I have lived and worked in numerous places in the world, and out of all those places, I know that Toronto is clearly the best place to build Wattpad into one of the world’s largest consumer Internet companies.
In Game 3 of the 1932 World Series, baseball legend Babe Ruth made a pointing gesture to the center field bleachers during his at-bat. It was a declaration that he would hit a home run to this part of the park. On the next pitch, Ruth hit a home run to center field, which helped the Yankees to win the game and, eventually, the World Series.
With this round of financing, the Wattpad team is now stepping up to the plate. We have some very ambitious goals, but we know exactly what we’re going to do to accomplish them:
We’re swinging for the fence.
I can’t wait to show you what the next chapter of the Wattpad story has in store.
- Allen Lau
Wattpad CEO and Co-Founder
P.S. To hear the real story behind this funding round, I’d like to suggest the Wattpad story September Capital. It was written by David Hornik, one of the partners from August Capital. The story is about an entrepreneur named Len Au who pitched to September Capital’s partner Tripp Skip Jones and his team. According to a credible source, this is a fictional version of a real story. You can see from the story that David is a great writer, and I hope he posts the next chapter soon!
