Cheddar Rakes in $22M of Corporate Dough in Latest Funding
Cheddar, the online streaming news service, raised $22 million in a Series D round last Monday with help from a bevy of corporate ventures.
All existing corporate investors participated in the round: The Raine Group, Comcast Ventures, Amazon, AT&T, and The New York Stock Exchange. New corporate investors include Liberty Global, Goldman Sachs & Co., Antenna Group, and Dentsu Ventures.
The latest round gives Cheddar a valuation of $160 million, close to double the $85 million after its last funding in May 2017, when it raised $19 million. Cheddar was founded in 2016 by CEO Jon Steinberg, former president and COO of BuzzFeed. Cheddar has raised $54 million to date.
“Cheddar has been the poster child for creating distinctive, high quality original content with its scoops, interviews, live broadcast innovations, distribution deals, and ad products,” said Gordon Rubenstein, Managing Partner of Raine Ventures and Cheddar board member, said in a statement. “It is the prototypical Raine company and we are thrilled to support Cheddar in its next phase of growth.”
Raine is a merchant bank based in New York.
Cheddar has dramatically increased its distribution in the past year with live linear broadcasts and on-demand programming on Sling, Comcast X1, Amazon, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, Twitch, and a host of other platforms. The company will launch its Snapchat Publisher Story in April.
According to a study from Market Strategies International, a provider of audience measurement services to leading cable networks, Cheddar viewership has already climbed to 10% among U.S. millennials (13% among 18–24 year olds) not two years since its first broadcast. The average live Millennial Cheddar viewer has also quickly formed loyalty to the brand with 89% of all users watching Cheddar content live in the last month. One in five 18–24 year olds is aware of the Cheddar brand, data shows.
Next month, Cheddar plans to launch “Cheddar Big News,” a general news network focused on non-partisan, national news with the style and sentiment of local news, the company said in a statement. “Cheddar Big News” will deliver the day’s headlines from politics, business, sports, weather and trending stories without crowding the set with pundits and panels.
