Reddit Raises $200 Million in Funding, Plans Site Overhaul

Reddit, the self-styled “front page of the internet,” has received $200 million in venture capital funding valuing the company at around $1.8 billion.

Recode reports that following the websites largest funding round ever, Reddit has received $200 million dollars pushing the company’s value up to $1.8 billion. Equipped with this new funding, Reddit plans an overhaul of their website including changes to their well known “front page” style homepage. Speaking to Recode, CEO Steve Huffman stated that the website’s front page would be completely redesigned and user uploaded video would be rolling out in the near future.

The latest investment comes from a number of well known Silicon Valley VC firms and individual investors such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital alongside Y Combinator President Sam Altman and Ron Conway of SV Angel. Hedge fund Coatue, investment firm Vy Capital and mutual fund giant Fidelity all also invested in the website. Advance Publications, the company that owns Condé Nast, was not part of this investment round but does still maintain a majority stake in Reddit with Condé Nast CEO Bob Sauerberg sitting on Reddit’s board of directors.

Despite a monthly visitor count of nearly 300 million, Reddit has not done much to update their style as the website has grown, a problem that CEO Steve Huffman seems well aware of, “We have a lot of perception debt,” Huffman told Recode from the website’s San Francisco headquarters. “Reddit feels old. We don’t want to be associated with old.” Huffman continued to say, “We want Reddit to be more visually appealing, so when new users come to Reddit they have a better sense of what’s there, what it’s for.”

Recode was reportedly given a sneak peak at Reddit’s new design and likens it to the News Feed design that has worked so well for social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter with content being broken up into “cards” with conversations hidden underneath. Unlike many social media platforms, Reddit’s primary audience still visit the website from their computers rather than their mobile device, “We will have, probably relative to our peers, a longer desktop life because of text and keyboards,” Huffman said. “It’s easier to create text from a keyboard. And I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing, it’s just a thing.”

Reddit has increased their employee headcount from 140 at the start of 2017 to 230 now with plans to hire 300 full-time employees before the end of the year. The company also plans to introduce direct video uploads to the website in the near future, possibly planning on competing for video ad dollars in the near future. Reddit has been selling ads on their website for years but according to Huffman only started to do so with structure in 2015. Reddit is not profitable as it currently stands.

Reddit has a history of censorship, particularly of Trump supporters. It is unknown if the site overhaul funded by this investment will also include an overhaul of Reddit’s stance on free speech.