NewsCred provides an enterprise content marketing platform (CMP) that combines technology, content, and services to help marketing teams ideate, plan, create, govern, and measure integrated campaigns. The company recently launched the Integrated Marketing Edition of its CMP, adding campaign planning and project management functionality to unify global marketing organizations. NewsCred says it is the leader in its category and has been positioned highest and furthest to the right in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Content Marketing Platforms for two consecutive years. It serves hundreds of enterprise customers, including Twitter, Fidelity, and Cisco, and claims to be the largest in its category in terms of revenue. Future plans include increasing R&D investment in integrated marketing and work management capabilities, broadening integrations with the marketing tech ecosystem, and expanding field operations across the US, EMEA, and APAC. The company intends to bolster support for its growing enterprise customer base as it scales globally. NewsCred, founded in 2008, offers a “SaaS platform plus marketplace” that lets brands plan and manage content-marketing campaigns and source content from licensed publications and freelance writers. Customers include Barclays, Cisco, NASDAQ, Pepsi, Toyota and Visa. CEO Shafqat Islam says the company’s software has been a major driver of growth and that the platform and marketplace complement each other. The company reports its annualized revenue run rate has tripled in the past year, and pieces of content created on the platform have increased by 182 percent. NewsCred plans to continue expanding the software so it can serve as the planning and orchestration tool for a brand’s entire marketing efforts, including planning for channels such as TV advertising (though not buying TV ads). The company argues its background in content gives it an edge because every marketing channel requires content as fuel. NewsCred operates an end-to-end content marketing platform that combines a content-licensing business with a freelancer network called The NewsRoom and workflow/analytics tooling. Its content-licensing partners include publishers such as The New York Times, Reuters, and Getty Images, which NewsCred says remain the foundation of its services. The NewsRoom supplies custom-written pieces from freelancers paid at premium rates (about $500 for a blog post and $1,000 for a researched article). The company counts clients including Procter & Gamble, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sprint, Xerox, Visa, Bank of America, AIG, The Hearst Corporation, and Time Inc. NewsCred employs more than 120 people and plans to more than double the size of its sales team; management intends to use new funding for sales hiring, marketing, and positioning against larger competitors. CEO and co-founder Shafqat Islam emphasizes building a full "content marketing stack" spanning planning, approvals, and analytics. NewsCred licenses articles, images, and videos from publishers including The New York Times and The Economist and packages them for brand marketing campaigns. Its platform combines technology and an editorial team to select and distribute content via web, email, and social networks for clients such as Pepsi, Toyota, and Johnson & Johnson. The company works with more than 2,500 news sources and reports that 60% of its customers are Fortune 500 companies. Revenue has grown 11-fold over the past year, and NewsCred reports a 540% increase in customers. Founded in 2008, the company has shifted product focus over time and acquired publishing startup Daylife as it moved toward content licensing for brands. Next steps include international expansion and partnering with smaller publications to broaden its content supply. NewsCred has repositioned itself as a B2B newswire, licensing content from more than 700 premium media brands and offering access through a paid news API. Its in-house editorial team filters and curates thousands of articles for each client, and the company uses proprietary semantic and natural language processing technology to organize 215K full-text articles from 700+ sources across 50 countries, in eight languages, into 20 categories and 47K topics. The platform is delivery- and platform-agnostic, providing content, images, and multimedia in XML, RSS, or JSON for web, mobile, tablet, and social integrations. Revenue is generated via monthly API licensing fees based on story volume and licensed sources, and all revenue is shared with content providers; the company is already paying some sources six-figure amounts. Target customers are publishers and brands seeking fully licensed full-text articles, photos, video, targeted editorial sections, and related advertising opportunities. The company pivoted twice previously and is positioning this model as a reinvention of the traditional newswire service.

Total raised

$106M

Funding rounds

6

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2019