Beehiiv Raises $33 Million More and Social Leverage Continues To Invest

The money is coming on the heels of some significant growth. When we covered beehiiv’s $12.5 million Series A in June 2023 (a round led by Lightspeed), the company had 7,500 active newsletters with 35 million unique readers and 350 million monthly impressions. Now, the company is sending out 1 billion emails per month from around 20,000 active newsletters (it didn’t disclose the number of unique readers, although that figure will have undoubtedly also risen). Newsletter users include both individual writers (plus individual “brands”: Arnold Schwarzenegger is among its customers) as well as bigger organizations like Boston Globe Media and Brex.

That sounds like a lot of newsletters, but beehiiv is looking for more. In the last year, the startup also built and launched an advertising network that sits alongside a range of pricing tiers based on different features and functionalities. (The company claims that in an average month its customers collectively make around $1.2 million monthly in revenues on its platform.)

CEO and co-founder Tyler Denk described the ad network it’s introduced as a “holy grail” for advertisers because of how it can link up specific campaigns to niche audiences that might be most attuned to seeing and responding to them. “It also means these newsletters can now monetize with ads like Netflix’s sponsoring them,” he added.

Niche or not, digital advertising business models are based on economies of scale, and so the focus will be on investing in more marketing, and signing deals with larger publishers, in order to bring more inventory into the mix.

“We’re only two years into this and we have a billion emails going out,” Denk said, referring to the period between being founded in October 2021 and now as “going from zero to one.”