The Tab fuels US expansion with $3m investment from Knight Foundation and Balderton Capital
NEW YORK: 9am GMT / 4am ET Thursday 10 December 2015 The Tab, the world’s largest platform for student journalists, is expanding across North America – with $3 million funding from the John S. and James L. and Balderton Capital, Europe’s leading venture capital firm.
The company opened an office of 16 editors in New York City in September, and now has 25 college sites in North America, including every Ivy League school.
The Tab is spending the funds on widening its American expansion, and building a technology platform which will create the biggest reporting network in the world.
This year The Tab has published 2650 journalists, and their local stories have generated more than 5,000 pageviews on average. Tab sites attract more than 200,000 sessions per month on average from their very loyal readerships.
George Marangos-Gilks and Jack Rivlin in The Tab’s New York office
Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief Jack Rivlin said: “The Tab is much more than a publisher – we are building the largest talent network on the planet by making the newsroom experience possible anywhere.
“Traditional media is out of touch with young people. By combining the ease of social with the quality of professional media, we’re producing original and incredibly engaging stories at a much lower cost.”
And the company is developing a dashboard which identifies the most promising writers from the start, based on how their writing and traffic data stacks up against past users, and then invests in their talent.
The site’s grassroots network has been responsible for major exclusives, including the unmasking of a teenager who joined ISIS, and in recent weeks, coverage of clashes between student protesters and administrators at Ivy League schools.
“The Tab is creating a model for hyperlocal news that extends beyond college campuses by preparing student journalists for the newsrooms of tomorrow,” said Ben Wirz, director for venture investments at Knight Foundation. “At the same time, the company continues to innovate with new content and engagement strategies that are generating a huge fan-base and pushing traditional news organizations to evolve.”
For interviews and images, please contact:
Jack Rivlin
Founder and Editor-in-Chief
The Tab
(001) 347 698 0989
(001) 347-696-4111
[email protected]
Ben Goldsmith
Head of PR & Content
Balderton Capital
+44 (0)207 016 6835
+44 (0)7823 526 676
[email protected]
About The Tab
Tab founders George Marangos-Gilks and Jack Rivlin founded The Tab as students at Cambridge in 2009 because they wanted to write for something more entertaining and direct than traditional student newspapers.
Rivlin said: “It’s an amazing time to be joining the US media, especially at universities. Our stories have already been quoted by the Washington Post and the New York Times, and a Tab editor has appeared on Fox News. We think we can become the biggest platform for talented young journalists in America, as we have in the UK.”
CEO Marangos-Gilks said: “Students in the US have been writing to us asking about starting their own Tab sites for a few years, so it’s a dream to be launching them now.”
The Tab’s US sites reached half a million uniques users in November, their first full month of publication. Tab sites in the US and UK combined attracted more than three million uniques in that month – its highest ever reach.
The Tab will launch at 45 more top US schools by April, including Stanford, Berkeley and the University of Texas, Austin.
The company prides itself on the graduate prospects of its student contributors. The Tab is the main route into the media in the UK. More than 50 Tab contributors have been employed by media companies like the Guardian, Vogue and BuzzFeed, and 29 have been hired by The Tab itself, while last year three of the four graduate trainees hired by the Telegraph were Tab campus editors.
Read more about The Tab’s mission here.
About Balderton
Balderton Capital is one of the largest venture capital firms in Europe, committed to finding and helping talented entrepreneurs build great companies. Based in London, the firm manages $2.3 billion. Since 2000, Balderton has invested in over 100 companies, principally across Europe. Notable realised investments include NaturalMotion (the mobile gaming developer, sold to Zynga in 2014), Betfair (the online betting exchange, 2010 IPO), LOVEFiLM (the home entertainment subscription service, sold to Amazon in 2011), MySQL (the open-source database software, sold to Sun Microsystems in 2008) and YOOX Group (the online retailer of leading fashion brands, IPO in 2009). The current portfolio includes innovative companies such as Nutmeg, CrowdCube, Lyst, 3D Hubs, Globoforce, Banjo, Prodigy Finance, Credit Benchmark, Kobalt, Openet, Scytl, Talend, The Hut Group, Tictail and WorldStores.