Scribd has just raised $58 million in capital from various companies, including Spectrum Equity. The last time they had a funding round was in 2015 and to date they have raised a total of $106 million in venture capital. Scribd has confirmed to Good e-Reader that they intend on using the money to hire more staff, expand into other markets and get access to a copious amount of digital content.
The full catalog includes over 1 million premium titles and 80 million documents, and readers have spent 190 million hours of reading on the platform to date. Scribd remains one of the best unlimited platforms that have audiobooks, ebooks, magazines and curated newspaper articles.
In order for Scribd to continue their success they have hired their first ever CFO, Tony Grimminck, who joined the team last month. He comes from Hotel Tonight, Stubhub and Womply and is on the board of several startups. Prior to moving to the Bay Area, Tony was a VP at Goldman Sachs in NYC.
Pete Jensen, Managing Director of Spectrum Equity, said, “As a differentiated content library, including robust user-generated content and ebooks and audiobooks from top tier publishers, Scribd is poised to be the leading online subscription reading service for consumers across the globe. Spectrum has been fortunate to be a part of successfully scaling several digital content businesses, and we look forward to partnering with Trip and the entire management team to help make Scribd a part of readers’ everyday lives.”
In a comment to Good e-Reader Remi Harrad, Communications Director at Scribd said “This round is about having both the capital and the partners to accelerate our growth , this means continuing to build the Scribd team as well as continuing to improve our product offering, such as more premium content , better recommendations and opening new growth channels. We believe that by doing this, we will be able to acquire more readers and drive more incremental revenue to the publishing ecosystem. We’re also continuing to focus on expanding outside of the U.S.”
Remi went on to say “Last month we launched a new reading experience in Mexico, which includes localized recommendations and payments system. Readers in Mexico have access to the full Scribd library which now includes over 60K premium Spanish-language titles from leading publishers, including Planeta, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial, Anagrama, Sexto Piso and El Colegio de México.”
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.