Stacker.News, a young startup based in Austin, Texas has announced it successfully closed its seed round.
The lead investors are Max Webster of Hivemind Ventures, NYDIG founder and executive chairman Ross Stevens, Raymond Tonsing of Caffeinated Capital, Mishti Sharma with Caffeinated’s Collective Fund, and Steve Lee filling up the rest. The seed round boosts the fresh venture with $1.25 million of risk capital pushing its post-money valuation to 25 million USD.
Founded by Keyan Kousha, former technical leader at data transport and streaming technology company Aspera (now IBM) Stacker News aims to become the next Reddit on the Lightning Network.
Breaking the news on his very own platform, founder Mr. Kousha announced:
“Valuation was 25m post-money (which I like to reveal because I’m usually curious when other companies announce their raises).
Here’s the pitch deck I used (huge assist from @kr on this): https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ONoS1VLKRYiG14ODx3tIboH9JdndxL2fQwlACWdULok/edit?usp=sharing
In total, this brings total raising to 1.55m and I’ve sold 10% of SN to people I really like.”
And on Twitter:
The raise will help Stacker News to grow and attract more users. The pitchdeck reveals one of the problems identified as “Companies keep ad revenue and users get nothing” and the way it’s solved “Revenue goes directly to the best users”.
According Stacker.News the addressable market size includes approximately 46 million bitcoin holders in America.
Bitcoin(BTC) News asked a few questions to Mr Kousha:
BN: Congratulations for raising your seed round for SN, how were the discussions with VC does the bear market affect investment appetite at all?
KK: Didn’t seem so for me, but I had traction so that helps.
BN: You’re hiring a few initial positions, who are you looking to get on board?
KK: I have Kevin Rooke helping, and otherwise not looking for another dev at least for a while.
BN: What are the next steps for SN from now?
KK: Next steps are keep building.
In his own words, the simple idea of stacker.news is “like Hacker News but we pay you #bitcoin”. The concept is to let users pay rewards for posts and comments they like. The rewards are actual bitcoin (or satoshis to be precise) and the credit earned can be easily withdrawn via the Lightning Wallet.
With pageviews soaring to 1 million hits per month, the Bitcoin(BTC) community is swiftly adopting Stacker News. The great acceptance might be owed to the fact that nobody in Bitcoin(BTC) lets and invitation to earn free sats just pass away especially since Twitter has been overloaded with too many pictures and less signal.
Time will tell if Stacker News can continue to attract people to share high quality bitcoin information, but the fresh funding and trust by world-class investors makes for a positive outlook. Users of SN are already excited for the upcoming features.
We congratulate Stacker.News and look forward to further growth.
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