Congratulations Team Beehiiv on $12.5 Million series A ....A Social Leverage Portfolio Company

Good afternoon…

I am writing today because I was waiting for the Beehiiv news to drop. They closed a $12.5 million series A investment led by Lightspeed Ventures which we participated in.

You can read about it in Techcrunch and Tyler Denk, the founder, wrote about the company and investment here.

Beehiiv is a fund 4 seed investment of our firm Social Leverage. We made the seed investment and I wrote about the company and product (the why) back in October, 2021.

I was not willing to move my 17 years of Wordpress blogging over to Beehiiv or anyone unless it was able to do all the things it can today (incredible deliverability, feature sets for easy publishing) and of course have my history of posts indexed and searchable.

By early last year they were ready, I made the transition (it was easy) and it has been great. The Beehiiv product has now exploded in popularity. I LOVE using Beehiiv and working with Tyler.

The investment came together quickly and Tyler chose to take the investment from Lightspeed. I have good friends at Lightspeed and have invested with them before (Payitoff). Sam Wholley runs the internal Lightspeed team that helps their companies with recruiting and I called on him to be involved in the process. Mike Mignano did a great job behind the scenes tracking me down on Twitter DM and pushing for Lightspeed to be the lead. I knew Michael when he had started Anchor a podcasting company (I passed on their seed investment…woops) that was acquired by Spotify after which he led podcasts/video for a few years. I thought this made for a perfect fit for Tyler and Beehiiv.

I believe that email newsletters are still the best way to communicate and reach people.

I am excited to see Tyler and Beehiiv team expand the team and product to continue to grow the platform and business.