News video aggregator Watchup just announced a new funding round, a $2.75 million investment led by Tribune Media, the broadcast arm of the former Tribune Company. With this round, Watchup has now raised $4.25 million since its launch in 2012. McClatchy along with prior funders the Knight Enterprise Fund, the Stanford-StartX Fund, and businessmen Ned Lamont, Gordon Crovitz, and Jim Friedlich are also investors.
“We are so excited about this round because we have brought together a select group of media innovators who are willing to contribute their industry knowledge and their content to help us reinvent the video news experience,”
Adriano Farano, Watchup’s co-founder and CEO said in a statement.
Watchup (which started
as a Knight News Challenge winner) is an app that allows users to build personalized newscasts by pulling video from dozens of global and local news outlets. Most of the video is pulled in through public YouTube channels, but Watchup also has agreements with The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, PBS NewsHour, and other organizations to directly provide video to the app.
This round marks the latest in a series of investments legacy news organizations are making in news startups. In September, Vice Media received
$500 million in funding, including $250 million from A&E Networks, which is owned by Hearst and Disney. Last month, The New York Times Co. and German publishing behemoth Axel Springer said they were investing $3.7 million into
Blendle, a Dutch news reading platform where readers pay by the article.
Tribune Media, for its part, is investing in Watchup because it “extends our vision of expanding the reach of quality local news content,” Larry Wert, Tribune’s president of broadcasting said in a statement. Tribune Media owns or operates 42 different local broadcast stations.
Show tagsHide tags
Leave a comment