Ning Worth Half A Billion Dollars

Social network platform Ning joined Slide in the Half Billion Dollar Club by raising $60 million (after banker fees) on a $500 million pre-money valuation. Like Slide, Ning used influential investment bank Allen & Co. to represent them in the deal.

Venturebeat broke the story based on a perusal of SEC filings, and we’ve confirmed it with Ning co-founder Marc Andreessen. “We have raised about $60M net at $500M pre from a set of institutional investors (who we’re not naming, since they said they’d prefer privacy, which we’d like to respect),” he said in an email.

Andreessen on how they’ll use the money: “We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.”

The timing of this is great for Ning – they’re also the subject of a beautifully uncritical fluff piece in this month’s Fast Company that talks about “viral expansion loops.”

Ning has now raised over $100 million.