Exciting News for Mashable

Today marks an important day for the present and future of Mashable. Today, we have announced $17 million in Series B funding, led by Time Warner Investments.

We couldn't have made it to this moment without the amazing staff we have managed to bring together, and without the brilliant, passionate Mashable audience who have supported us from the start.

Below is the memo I sent along to the team.

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Folks,

Tomorrow Mashable will take another big step in building a next-generation media company by closing an additional $17 million in Series B capital, led by Time Warner Investments.

This investment comes after a huge year for Mashable, in which we took giant leaps to build the foundation for a global media brand.

Over the past 12 months, Mashable has seen extraordinary growth across all areas of the company. As a testament to our good work, all significant investors from our Series A round have joined Time Warner Investments in this round of funding.

We are taking this capital to build upon our momentum over the past year, in which we focused on growing revenue, expanding internationally, bulking up editorially and strengthening the foundation of a company that had operated for nearly a decade as a self-funded startup. And in no uncertain terms, we succeeded in doing just that.

We moved into a new global headquarters in New York City to house our rapidly growing team, as well as opening offices in key markets such as London and Los Angeles. We hired teams internationally and we brought Mashable to the U.S. Hispanic community with El Pulso.

We achieved record revenue growth of 45% year-over-year by introducing new ways to better serve our brand partners: adding additional talent to the sales team globally, strengthening and broadening the base of our client portfolio, and offering brands the ability to connect with the Mashable community in meaningful and imaginative ways.

We grew our global uniques 40% by investing in building out our editorial staff across the board: creating new, dedicated editorial teams in London and Los Angeles, adding staff in Sydney and building a strong network of global journalists. We doubled down in historically strong verticals such as tech, social media, business and digital culture while taking on and mastering new areas such as climate, entertainment, real-time news, travel and history.

We grew our social media following to 21 million across platforms – up 60% from 2013 — by developing winning strategies and integrating social more deeply into all that we do. We aggressively invested more in new, sharable formats that brought our content to our community in the most interactive ways possible: whether that was the Lego Senate project, Facebook Q&As on Net Neutrality, Twitter chats on business, live coverage of tech product launches on Snapchat or making climate stories more accessible through Vines.

All of this progress is powered by our innovative product suite, which is disrupting the market on multiple fronts. This year we have shown the industry that we are truly a media and technology hybrid.

We've launched an industry-leading social prediction platform that gives us a competitive edge while also creating a new revenue stream through the licensing of our powerful Velocity system to trusted clients. We've launched a long-form builder that puts next generation storytelling tools in the hands of our editorial and sales teams -- what they're building is truly amazing. We've made the creation of our proprietary Lift advertisements easy and fun, and our clients have rewarded us with increased spending and usage. We've built a world-class Android and iOS app, and our native apps team is just getting started.

We’ve achieved all of this while remaining lean, efficient and effective in our operations, which is one of the many reasons top investors are excited to work with us.

So why take capital now?

In order to aggressively build upon this success in 2015, we felt the time was right to double down on our investment in key areas that will be integral to the long-term success of Mashable. This funding only augments our already strong revenue base. With this round, we will continue to invest across the business and look to:

- Add 100 staff globally, with a focus towards expansion in the Asia-Pacific region.

- Grow Velocity’s capabilities for brand partners. One area of intense focus will be continuing to develop and refine the platform, building on its successful beta launch with 360i and MEC in 2014. This additional source of revenue for our company has immense potential, which we will look to further unlock this year.

- Expand our video efforts across platforms. We’ve built a solid foundation with popular series like Mashable Explains and “TL:DW,” as well as Mashable’s continued news video segments like product reviews and Docu-series. We will continue to develop videos that inform, explain and entertain as we invest in building more capabilities and premium content for our brand partners.

We’ve seen a massive transformation in the media industry over the past few years, with digital entities looking to match or surpass their traditional counterparts. With this transformation comes new leaders, and we continue to solidify our place among the new guard of twenty-first century media companies.

This additional funding will allow Mashable to build upon the foundation we have developed over the last decade and capitalize on the enormous opportunity in the digital media industry.

Our growth will be deliberate and strategic. We will always maintain our startup ethos even as we compete on a global scale.

Since I started Mashable as a teenager in Scotland, our goal has been to document the digital revolution. We speak for all those who believe that technology can change our lives for the better. And as this digital wave sweeps through every industry, our influence continues to expand.

We are the storytellers of the digital generation. As we enter 2015, we have a unique opportunity to pen media’s next chapter and cement Mashable’s place in digital history.

- Pete