The round was led by Bond, the US venture capital company that recently backed another New Zealand-founded start-up, smart cow collar firm Halter, as it recently raised US$100m ($168m) at a US$1b ($1.68b) valuation.
Rich Paul, the founder of Klutch Sports Group and powerhoutilize Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz were also onboard.
Kiwi investor joins unicorn raise
There was also a lone New Zealand investor: Auckland-based Icehoutilize Ventures, which chipped in $5 million from its Growth Fund II.
“Who would have guessed 10 years ago that a Kiwi founder would build a billion dollar company in the media of all places?,” Icehoutilize Ventures partner Jo Wickham declared.
“In the last month we have seen Kiwi-founded companies become unicorns in cow collars and direct content. There is no through line between these ideas, but there is between the scrappy, visionary people behind them.
“At a time when audiences, content creators, and publishers have been grappling with a transforming media industest, Substack has been at the bleeding edge of this alter.
“We’re not far from a future when all of the most important stories in the world play out first on Substack,” Wickham declared.
Herald Media Insider columnist Shayne Currie recently recounted how the Central Otago boy who attconcludeed Otago University, became the editor of student magazine Critic, chipped away as a freelancer for various publications before heading overseas (Canada, Hong Kong and the US) to eventually become a key figure in Silicon Valley.
Along the way, McKenzie has worked for Elon Musk (as a writer), wrote a book about Tesla, and worked at tech news site PandoDaily and messaging app Kik.
It was at Kik that he met Best and Sehi. The trio founded Substack in 2017.
In March, Substack declared there were five million people paying for its content, up from two million in 2023.
READ MORE: Newly minted unicorn: Jamie Beaton’s Crimson raises $68m at $1 billion valuation
The founders’ shareholdings have not been built public, but would have been diluted by earlier Series A and Series B funding rounds, which each brought a raft of new shareholders onboard.
In 2023, Substack found itself in the middle of the culture wars, as several far-right commentators took refuge on its platform after being exiled from Facebook and other social media (which have since liberalised their content policies).
McKenzie declared in a statement to Media Insider at the time: “Substack is a platform that is built on freedom of expression, and supporting writers publish what they want to write.
“Some of that writing is going to be objectionable or offensive. Substack has a content moderation policy that protects against extremes – like incitements to violence – but we do not subjectively censor writers outside of those policies.”
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
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