When I first wrote about Y Combinator-backed startup Submittable in 2012, the company said it had raised $450,000 in funding. Submittable has continued raising since then, and with a recent $100,000 grant from the state of Montana, the total is now more than $1 million.
Compared to some of the other fundings we cover here at TechCrunch, that might not seem enormously impressive, but keep in mind that Submittable isn’t based in Silicon Valley or New York or Los Angeles. Instead, it was founded and remains headquartered in Missoula, Montana, and according to co-founder Michael FitzGerald, it’s profitable.
The source of its most recent funding is unusual, too — FitzGerald said it comes from a state trust fund of money from the coal industry, which is supposed to create tech jobs and keep them in Montana.
Submittable’s goal is to make it easy for publications and other businesses to receive, track, and manage submissions. Many of its earliest customers were literary magazines (FitzGerald is a published novelist himself), but the company’s ambitions are broader than that, with new clients including CBS, Simon & Schuster, and the NCAA. (We’ve also used Submittable to manage some of our guest column submissions at TechCrunch.)
The company added an API last fall, which (among other things) allowed customers to publish Submittable content directly to their site and to build their own interfaces. And it launched a mobile version in January.
The ultimate vision, FitzGerald said, is to become “the on-board ramp for all content and media in all organizations.”