Компания Workweek привлекла 17 млн долларов для масштабирования платформы B2B-рассылок

The business-to-business media company Workweek has raised an additional $17 million to fund the expansion of its newsletter platform, founder and chief executive Adam Ryan tells ADWEEK. The raise, financed by Next Coast Ventures with participation from Aperiam Ventures, comes two years after the company raised $12.5 million in its Series A in June 2024. In total, Workweek has raised $36.5 million. The company declined to share its updated valuation. It generates “north of $20 million” in revenue, per Ryan, and is not profitable. Rather than built around a core editorial staff, Workweek operates as a series of branded franchises, each led by a “practitioner creator,” its term for an industry expert who writes about their work while still maintaining their primary job. Currently, the Workweek ecosystem consists of five verticals whose content is produced by eight practitioner creators. The verticals include finance, human resources, marketing, commerce, and healthcare, and each has distinct branding—its human resources franchise, for instance, is called I Hate It Here and written by chief people officer Hebba Youssef. Across these franchises, Workweek has around 150,000 audience members, each of whom has to apply and be vetted to join the community. This filtration process enables Workweek to ensure that, for example, only HR professionals are reading I Hate It Here, creating industry-specific communities that bolster its appeal to endemic advertisers, according to Ryan. With its new round of funding, Workweek aims to dramatically increase the number of franchises and practitioner creators by making its content-creation tools available to anyone in the network. It already has 35 new newsletters prepared to launch and anticipates that “thousands” more practitioner creators will launch their own email products over the coming year, per Ryan. “Before we were a content platform, where creators created content and we put it in the platform,” he said. “Now we are a newsletter platform.” A B2B newsletter platform For creators, the appeal of launching on Workweek, compared to rival platforms like Substack or Beehiiv, comes down to the audience. The natural industry alignment created by the franchise structure means that practitioner creators are creating content specifically for an audience of their own peers. This creates a tighter sense of community than writing for a general audience, as well as drives up the value of its advertising inventory. It also means that new authors have a preexisting community of potential subscribers to tap. “We’ve been building our ad platform for two and a half years,” said Ryan. “What we’ve done is identify about 81% of subscribers to who they are and the company they work for. For advertisers, we can promise them that every impression is someone in their industry.” On Workweek, practitioner creators can expect CPMs up to five times the industry average, according to Ryan, with some newsletters netting around $75 per 1,000 readers. Two of its top creators are banking over seven figures in revenue per year, while others can make five figures annually with just one send per week. Workweek takes a percentage of the revenue it generates across this ad network, although the cut varies, according to Ryan. Now that any practitioner creator can create their own newsletter, the expansion should grow the volume of content created and shared, both inside and outside the Workweek platform, helping to more quickly scale its audience. The strategy is a bet on the growing prominence of B2B creators, whose field combines the efficacy of creator marketing with the lucrative returns of B2B advertising. Other companies in the space, including Marketing Brew and Smooth Media, are making similar investments in these so-called knowledge creators. The strategy is not without its challenges, according to Brian Morrissey, industry analyst and author of The Rebooting. Primarily, the amount of capital Workweek has raised means it will have to generate a substantial exit to justify its investment, per Morrissey. Following the fundraising excesses of the last decade, in recent years media startups have tried to raise as little funding as possible. The $36.5 million Workweek has tallied is by no means exorbitant, but it is nonetheless substantial. The five-year-old company also faces friction in the discovery process, per Morrissey. By dent of its exclusive nature, showcasing content only to approved members of its franchises, Workweek content is not highly visible on purpose. Its decision to operate as a federation of franchises, rather than under the Workweek brand, also complicates that effort. Enabling more practitioner creators to create and distribute content should mitigate these issues, according to Ryan. “In the age of the For You algorithm, having relevant vertical social networks for professionals is a necessity,” said Ryan.