Last week, we reported that Tumblr scored a substantial amount of money from Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital — but we didn’t how much. Today, reports are surfacing that the blogging platform has raised between $25 million and $30 million, with a valuation around $135 million.
Fortune says that Sequoia Capital was the lead investor this round, and speculates that Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures (who in the past raised Tumblr $10 million) both contributed as well. It’s also being said that Sequoia’s Roelof Botha will be joining Tumblr’s board.
TechCrunch spoke with Founder David Karp today, and although he declined to comment on funding, he did share that Tumblr has some new digs in the form of a new New York office, and that they’ve made some hires. Right now they have 16 employees (up from 12), with a staff of 20 projected for the end of this year and a staff of 30 by the early 2011.
As we noted last week, Tumblr also recently hired Derek Gottfrid from The New York Times as director of product, and today TC reports that Rich Tong, a co-founder of Weardrobe, will be coming on as a community director in charge of the fashion community. Karp hopes to focus on the individual communities within Tumblr as a way of distinguishing the service from other platforms, like Facebook.
“[Tumblr wants to be] the best place in the world for the best creative communities,” Karp told TC.
We’ve reached out to Karp for more info on the funding round, as well as its new hires.
We think that hires like this could really further distinguish Tumblr as a unique blogging platform and community. As it stands, Tumblr is an extremely social platform — even serving as inspiration for giants likeWordPress, who recently added quick reblogging and the ability to “like” posts. In addition, it has an extremely creative community, having the distinction of seeing 14 of its blogs score book deals.
(via: mashable.com)
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