Israel-based SeekingAlpha, publisher of user-generated financial commentary has raised a B round of $7 million, led by DAG Ventures and joined by previous backers Benchmark (Michael Eisenberg) and Accel.
David Jackson, founder and CEO of SeekingAlpha reported on his instant blog that the round “provides us with a strong capital base to support our innovation and growth plans for the coming years”.
SeekingAlpha provides stock market opinion and analysis information from blogs, money managers, and investment newsletters. The content is provided by a community of contributors and some retained writers. Most publishers are not paid, but SeekingAlpha has been trying to increase the incentives for bloggers to participate with non-monetary perks.
As an active SA contributor I was recently solicited to take a survey which described the potential perks of being an SA contributor, including: free conference tickets, free books, subscriptions to research tools, introductions to company management teams, tools for self-promotion & monetization, access to journalists/media and just general exposure.
This is an interesting round as it may signal a move from crowdsourced publishing to a new business model, perhaps a community of experts or a marketing/sales operation for business services. More to come. SeekingAlpha was founded in 2004 and is based in New York and Israel.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
