Wattpad is a disruptive community based website where users share and collaborate on electronic texts in eBook format. The company has grown to impressive proportions since its inception in 2006 earning an incredible 10 million individual monthly users who spend a cumulative 2.4 billion minutes on the site. Those numbers came from a strong idea well executed combined with high levels of engagement.
That type of combination couldn’t keep investors away for long as the Toronto-based company was able to secure two separate rounds of funding (TQ was on it)from established names such as Khosla Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Golden Venture Partners as well as Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang. According to an official announcement made earlier this week, the latest round of funding which totaled $17.3 million included money from Canada’s own OMERS Ventures.
According to Wattpad CEO Allen Lau, OMERS courtship of the start-up led to an investment made at the same valuation as the other companies involved in the aforementioned Round B. Although amounts were not disclosed, the investment is mutually beneficial as Wattpad possesses a promising future and OMERS has a strong network of accelerator funds and access to talented employee pools.
The latter is important to Lau, whose company will be hiring aggressively in order to keep up with both the product development and community management aspects of its user experience. Wattpad is expected to double its current workforce of 25 over the next year.
The official news came at a much later time that the official round announcement due to the fact that their addition to the round was made in the 11th hour, requiring the paperwork to just be completed earlier this month. Wattpad is expected to use the newly acquired funds to grown its community and team as well as explore various revenue streams that exist thanks to its user loyalty and overall popularity.
OMERS has been extremely busy of late, investing significant amounts of money in promising Canadian firms including $20M in HootSuite Media Inc., $16M in BuildDirect and $20M in Vision Critical Communications. The firm was also a participant in Desire2Learn’s $80M Series A round.
SOURCE: The Financial Post
PHOTO: Tech Vibes
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