Substack, the San Francisco-based newsletter publishing platform, is raising a new round of funding, according to an SEC filing.
The publishing startup has raised just over $3 million since mid-May and is targeting $5 million in total new funding, the filing shows.
In April, Substack also closed a crowdfunding campaign in which it raised more than $7.8 million, boosting its total funding to more than $86 million.
The company did not respond to a request for comment.
It's unclear whether the new undisclosed round is connected to other fundraising efforts, but it comes just about one year since Substack reportedly cancelled its plans to raise a Series C round. The company had been in talks with investors to raise as much as $100 million at a valuation that could have reached $1 billion, the NYT reported last year.
The company was previously valued at $650 million after raising a $65 million Series B round in 2021, according to PitchBook.
Andreessen Horowitz led the company's $19 million Series A round in 2019. The startup's other previous investors include Y Combinator and General Catalyst.
CEO Christopher Best co-founded the company in 2017 to allow individual writers to cultivate a direct audience through newsletters that could be monetized through subscriptions.
Over the past several years, it has lured many prominent journalists away from legacy newsrooms and large digital news operations. But it's unclear if Substack will able to sustainably grow its revenue and generate a profit.
The company has 35 million active subscriptions, but most of those are from free users, it disclosed on its Wefunder campaign profile. Only 2 million are paid subscribers.
It has generated more than $300 million for its paid writers, the disclosure said, and its top 10 newsletters collectively earn more than $25 million a year.
"All I have to do is find a few thousand people who will pay me $10 a month or $100 a year and I'll have one of the best jobs in journalism," tech reporter Casey Newton told NPR in 2020. Newton left The Verge, owned by Vox Media, that same year to launch a Substack newsletter.
Substack takes a 10% cut from any subscription fees that its independent publishers set; Stripe also takes a payment processing fee.
The company hasn't disclosed its revenue and other figures for 2022 but provided financial data for 2020 and 2021 on its Wefunder page. It increased its total subscription fee revenue five-fold from 2020 to 2021 but its net losses also ballooned from $2.3 million to $22.9 million over the same period.
Facebook parent company Meta launched its own newsletter platform called Bulletin in 2021, but started winding the project down just a year later.
Substack also laid off 14% of its 90-person staff last year, the NYT reported. A few weeks later, a Vox article declared that "the newsletter boom is over."
