Cheddar, the business and tech news service focused on affluent millennials, has landed a $22 million Series D round led by Raine Ventures.
Cheddar, which has raised about $32 million so far, said the funds will be used in part to fuel domestic and international expansion.
Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, Comcast Ventures, AT&T, Altice USA, The New York Stock Exchange, Ribbit Capital, and Amazon participated in the latest round, as did new ones such as Liberty Global, Goldman Sachs, Antenna Group, 7 Global Capital, and Dentsu Ventures.
In line with its new funding, Cheddar talked up a growing distribution strategy that expanded on its OTT roots to also include work with MVPDs and other partners that include Sling TV, Layer3 TV (now part of T-Mobile), Comcast (for its X1 platform), Amazon, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, and Twitch, among others.
It also has plans to launch its Snapchat Publisher Story offering in April, as well as Cheddar Big News, a service that’s billed as a “general news network” covering politics, business, sports, weather and trending stories “without crowding the set with pundits and panels.”
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Cheddar is valued at $160 million, up from $85 million following its previous funding round, and has booked $18 million in revenue for 2018, Cheddar founder and CEO Jon Steinberg told The Wall Street Journal.
"I'm thrilled to welcome this group of leading global media powerhouses into Cheddar," Jon Steinberg, founder and CEO of Cheddar,” Steinberg said in a statement. "We are strengthening our already robust balance sheet with capital that we can use to bring our Post Cable Networks to Europe and beyond. We own all of our IP and now is the time to monetize this asset globally."
"Our investment in Cheddar is the first step in what will be our international collaboration with the company," Simon Freer, chief commercial officer of Liberty Global's content investments arm, said in a statement. “Cheddar is the leader in live digital news video, and owns all its IP. We believe Cheddar can go global, and we are excited to collaborate with the company to make that a reality."
