Medium

Medium is an online publishing platform for long form articles and blogs, operated by A Medium Corporation. Evan Williams, who earlier co-founded Blogger and Twitter, launched it in August 2012 as a place for writing longer than a tweet. It mixes amateur writers, professional writers and hosted publications, and since 2017 it has run a membership model, now $5 a month or $50 a year, that shares subscription revenue with the writers members read. The company is based in San Francisco.

French Wikipedia records a first outside round of $25 million in January 2014 from investors including Greylock Partners, Google Ventures and Betaworks, followed by a 2015 round led by investors including Google Ventures and Greylock that valued the company at about $400 million. By January 2017, when Medium cut about 50 staff and closed its New York and Washington offices after abandoning an advertising push, it had raised $134 million from venture firms and Williams himself. TechCrunch put total venture funding at $163 million in 2022, naming Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock and Obvious Ventures among the backers. Board members in 2020 included Josh Elman of Greylock and Ben Horowitz.

Medium remains private and has not announced an exit. It acquired Embedly in 2016, Glose in January 2021, and Projector and Knowable in November 2021, then shut Projector in 2022. In March 2021 it scaled back its own editorial publications to focus on independent writers. Williams stepped down as chief executive in July 2022, becoming chairman, and Coach.me founder Tony Stubblebine took over as CEO. The company reported 60 million monthly readers in 2017 and has not published a current valuation.

Medium shows how far a strong founder track record can carry a consumer media business without a settled revenue model. Its early backers entered in 2014 at the seed and early stage on Williams' Twitter pedigree, but the company tried editorial publishing, native advertising and finally reader subscriptions over a decade, with layoffs at each turn. More than ten years after its first institutional round, its investors have no announced liquidity, and the 2015 valuation is the only one on record.