Blodget: Business Insider goal is to be world’s biggest biz news source

Here is the note that Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget sent to his staff in the wake of the announcement that the business news site has received a $25 million investment:

Dear Team,

I am pleased to tell you that we have just closed a $25 million investment round led by the German media company Axel Springer. Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners, RRE Ventures, and other of our existing investors also increased their investments in the company.

Axel Springer is one of the world’s leading news organizations. Founded in 1946, the company is headquartered in Berlin and produces dozens of newspapers, magazines,, and digital services in 40 countries. Axel Springer’s German publications include the national daily newspapers Die Welt and Bild, the latter of which has the largest daily circulation in Europe. More than half of the company’s revenue comes from digital services.

This investment will allow us to continue to do what we have done for the past seven years: Invest in high-quality native digital journalism with the goal of becoming the world’s biggest and best source of business news and information.

Last year we reached some remarkable milestones:

* We became the No. 1 business news brand in the U.S., with 35 million readers a month (comScore)

* We grew our video journalism to 10 million monthly streams on Business Insider alone.

* We launched Business Insider UK, our 7th international edition. Monthly readership at BI UK has grown more than 50% since the November launch.

* We developed a new version of Viking, our proprietary real-time publishing and distribution platform. Viking is the foundation of everything we do, and it is one of the most sophisticated and powerful content platforms in the industry.

* We expanded our readership among the new generation of business leaders. The shift to digital is generational, with today’s younger professionals finding and sharing news and information profoundly differently than prior generations. Business Insider reaches this digital generation, including a quarter of the millennials in the US.

* We improved the scope, quality, and impact of our journalism:

• We launched several new original video series, including  “Game Changers” and “Above and Beyond.”

• We published dozens of original investigations, including ground-breaking inside stories on Google, Tesla, AOL Facebook, Greenpeace, YouTube, and startups like Snapchat.

• We expanded our pioneering style of photojournalism, including stories on America’s food-waste problem, the impact of global warming on a disappearing island economy, homelessness in Silicon Valley, and a thriving clothes manufacturer in Williamsburg, Brooklyn .

• We conducted exclusive in-depth interviews with Jeff Bezos, John Chambers, Paul Krugman, Clay Christensen, Barry Diller, Jeff Weiner, Richard Branson, and many other leaders.

• We celebrated the publication of the first book based on one of our stories, Nicholas Carlson’s Marissa Mayer and the Fight To Save Yahoo, which was just published by Hachette and has received excellent reviews.

• We expanded our premium subscription research and analysis service to offer two new subjects, “Payments” and “Internet of Things.”