Digg Valued At $175 Million In Latest Funding

Friday, September 26th, 2008

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Digg’s latest funding round valued the company at “around $175 million” we’ve heard from a source with knowledge of the deal. The company raised nearly $29 million in the round, which was announced earlier this month.

The valuation seems about right for the company, which attracted 15.7 million worldwide visitors in August, up from 10.1 million a year ago (Comscore) (click here for Quantcast data, which shows much higher traffic). The financing was a second choice for Digg, which thought it was getting bought by Google for $200 million until a last minute glitch killed the deal. After it was clear the deal wasn’t going to happen, the company pursued a financing instead.

We’ve also confirmed that founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson sold some personal stock in the transaction, as GigaOm first reported. However, our sources say the dollar amount they each took off the table was relatively small, about $2 million each, and that the venture capitalists had an appetite for more (since they’re the ones buying the stock). That’s good news for the company because it shows Kevin and Jay, at least, think the valuation was low, and were willing to keep their stock in play.

Tags:

Sponsored Ads

blog comments powered by Disqus

Sponsored Ads

Sponsored Ads

Upcoming Events

E3 2012

Los Angeles, CA

Disrupt SF 2012

San Francisco, CA