Scribd Raises $22 Million in Financing to Expand Ebook Subscription Service

From a News Release:

Scribd today announced that it has closed a $22 million financing led by Khosla Ventures with reinvestment from existing backers including Redpoint Ventures, Charles River Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. Seasoned entrepreneur Keith Rabois will join Scribd’s board as a board observer. This brings Scribd’s total funding to date up to $48M.
“We had a fantastic 2014 at Scribd. We launched audiobooks with 30,000 titles from publishers like Blackstone and Scholastic. We also doubled our e-Book titles, adding content from 1,000+ publishers – including Big 5 publishers Harper Collins and Simon & Schuster – along with industry leaders like Harlequin, Houghton Mifflin, Lonely Planet, Perseus and Wiley,” said Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Scribd. “This new funding round will enable us to work towards achieving our goal of creating the most comprehensive library of the future for our millions of users around the world.”
Scribd, which launched in 2007, now has more than 80M monthly readers accessing their books and documents worldwide. The new capital resources raised will be used to reinvest in the business to further accelerate hiring, content acquisition efforts and international expansion. Since the launch of the company’s subscription book service in October 2013, the subscriber base has grown an average of 31% per month. Scribd readers have spent more than 17M hours reading half a million premium e-books and have logged 180,000 listening hours in the first 60 days since launching its audiobooks service.

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Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Funding, Libraries, News, Patrons and Users, Resources, Scholastic