Citing a continued surge in growth and a need to scale up its infrastructure, Wattpad, an online writing community and social reading platform focused on mobile devices, announced that it has raised $17.3 million in new funding led by Khosia Ventures of San Francisco, with Yahoo! Founder Jerry Yang and current investors Union Square Ventures of New York and Golden Venture Partners in Toronto also joining. Wattpad has more than 8 million monthly visitors who have uploaded more than 5 million stories with more than 500,000 stories uploaded every month.
Contacted on the exhibition floor of BookExpo America in New York City, Wattpad CEO Alan Lau said the new round of funding would allow them to, “expand our team, hire more engineers and designers and create new products.” Lau said Wattpad is looking to create new features focused on collaborative and interactive storytelling.
Wattpad users upload stories in all genres, including mystery, romance, sci-fi, poetry and fan fiction and its platform is optimized for use by a generation of readers that prefer to read on mobile devices of all kinds. "Wattpad has seen incredible growth and found a way to make long-form written content bite-sized and digestible for the mobile age,” Watt said.
