Tumblr just landed a major investor in the form of Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital. The blogging service also confirmed today that it has hired Derek Gottfrid from The New York Times as director of product.
According to Business Insider, the blogging platform — headed up by 24-year-old David Karp — scored a “very big and competitive” round of financing from Sequoia, but there’s still no word on the total amount. Additionally, Sequoia’s Roelof Botha (previously the CFO of PayPal) has reportedly joined Tumblr’s board. We reached out to Karp this morning for comment and have yet to hear back.
Also, according to TechCrunch, Gottfrid, who worked at The New York Times for 12 years, is leaving the publication today to join Karp and Co. Gottfrid apparently toasted the move yesterday, as evidenced by the tweet below:
Tumblr has been gaining its share of attention of late — scoring $5 million from Spark and Union Square Ventures in April, intriguing the old guard of print media and perhaps even serving as inspiration for more established platforms such as WordPress.
The company is based in New York, but according to BI, Karp and Tumblr President John Maloney visited the West Coast last month to look for funding, which apparently came in the form of the Sequoia Capital investment. We’re curious to see what this reported cross-coastal influx of money will have on the startup.
In the meantime, Tumblr has seen pretty steady growth when it comes to traffic. Last week, Karp told us that about the service is seeing 80 million pageviews per month on mobile devices — and that’s just 3% of total traffic. Below, you can see the company’s growth in web traffic over the past year:
Chart courtesy of Quantcast
Reviews: Tumblr, WordPress
More About: david-karp, Derek Gottfrid, money, sequoia capital, the new york times, tumblr
For more Business coverage:
- Follow Mashable Business on Twitter
- Become a Fan on Facebook
- Subscribe to the Business channel
- Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad