Lauren Indvik2013-04-05 15:20:44 UTCAmazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has led a $5 million investment round in Business Insider, the six-year-old online media outfit run by former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget.
The investment came about after a dinner Bezos and Blodget had some months ago. "We had dinner a while back," Blodget wrote in an e-mail to Mashable. "A few months later he expressed interest in investing. I said, 'Hell, yeah!'"
Previous investors RRE Ventures and Institutional Venture Partners also participated in the $5 million Series E round. The investment, Bezos' first in the company, brings total investment to more than $18.3 million, Blodget confirmed. He declined to state the company's valuation, writing, "That's double super-secret info. (I could tell you, but then they'd have to kill me.)" The exact amount of Bezos' contribution is unknown.
The investment is unusual — not least because Amazon is covered almost daily by BI reporters, including Blodget.
BI said it will disclose Bezos' investment on all posts concerning Amazon.
Bezos and Blodget have been acquainted since at least the late '90s. In fact, much of Blodget's early fame is attributed to a prediction he made in October 1998 about Amazon. Blodget, then a research analyst at Oppenheimer, forecast that the e-tailer's stock price would nearly double to reach $400 per share, which it did a month later, soaring 128%. (Blodget was later banned from working in the securities industry following a 2003 investigation by the SEC, which ruled that Blodget had issued statements on several Internet companies, not including Amazon, that "expressed views inconsistent with privately expressed negative views.")
BI draws 9 million unique visitors per month according to comScore (and 24 million, according to Blodget). The company is headquartered in Flatiron and employs about 100 people. It was co-founded 2007 with Kevin Ryan, who is also a founder and former CEO of both Gilt Groupe and DoubleClick. Ryan has served as chairman, and Blodget as CEO and editor-in-chief, of BI since its inception.
According to Bloomberg, the site lost $3 million on revenue of $10 million last year. It expects to bring generate more than $15 million in sales this year, though it may not turn a profit. Of course, Bezos himself has never been particularly focused on profits.
Image courtesy of Flickr, jervetston.
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