Social news and user-generated content platform Reddit has secured a $50 million round of funding. The investment was led by Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator (out of which Reddit launched in 2004), with participation from Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital, and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz.
Hip hop icon Snoop Dogg, and actor Jared Leto also joins Peter Thiel, Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, Jessica Livingston, Kevin and Julia Hartz, Mariam Naficy, Josh Kushner, and Yishan Wong, CEO of the site, as fellow investors in the investment.
In an interesting development, the site says that it plans to give ten per cent of their shares back to the community; it is after all user-generated content that drives the site, “in recognition of the central role the community plays in reddit’s ongoing success.” In a blog post, Mr. Wong said that they are “going to need to figure out a bunch of details to make it work”.
Reddit plans to use the investment to hire more staff for product development, expand its community management team, build out better moderation and community tools, work more closely with third-party developers on mobile offerings, improve its self-serve ad product, build out the redditgifts marketplace, and pay for its growing technical infrastructure, among other things.
Reddit started as one of the first Y Combinator companies, and was subsequently acquired by Conde Nast. Three years ago the site spun out as an independent entity.
[Image courtesy: Reddit]