Betaworks

Betaworks Studio, LLC

Company type	Private
Industry	Venture Capital Business Studio
Founded	2007;18 years ago (2007)
Founder	John Borthwick
Headquarters	New York City , United States
Website	betaworks.com

Betaworks Studio, LLC is an American startup studio and seed stage venture capital company based in New York City ^{[1] [2] [3] [4]} that invests in network-focused media businesses.

Its hybrid investor/builder model has led to investments in fast-growing startups such as Tumblr, Airbnb, Groupon, and Twitter; and more exclusive stakes in internally built startups such as Chartbeat, Bitly, and SocialFlow. Betaworks was founded in 2007 by John Borthwick. ^[5]

In 2016, the company gained some attention through "The Intern" podcast, hosted and produced by employee Allison Behringer. ^[6]

In 2016, Betaworks sold its Instapaper product to Pinterest, a social media scrapbooking site, . ^[7]

Studio

Current:

• Activate (app) helps people discover and follow their favorite blogs. The site was founded in Sweden and has over 2 million members, 70% of them who follow fashion blogs & over 90% who are female. Shortly after it took $1 million of investment from Betaworks and Lerer Hippeau Ventures in 2012, traffic spiked following Google's announcement to discontinue Google Reader. ^[8]
• In April 2013, the company released Dots, a video game downloaded over 10 million times.

Former:

• Chartbeat, which provides realtime analytics to websites and blogs. It shows visitors, load times, and referring.
• Bitly, which that allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier.
• Giphy lets anyone search for animated gifs on the web. It was born out of an experiment by two hackers in residence, Alex Chung and Jace Cooke, who found it difficult to browse the best gifs on the web. It spread unexpectedly quickly, serving millions of results in the first few weeks. "We could tell it struck a nerve, so we swarmed it," said Paul Murphy, the head of product at Betaworks told The Verge ^[9] In May 2020, it was announced that Giphy had agreed to be acquired by Facebook Inc. (now Meta Platforms), with a reported purchase price of $400 million. Facebook services had accounted for roughly half of Giphy's overall traffic. Giphy was to be integrated with the staff of Facebook subsidiary Instagram, although Facebook stated that there would be no immediate changes to the service. ^{[10] [11]}
• SocialFlow, which optimizes the real-time value of content.
• In July 2012, the company acquired the Digg brand and internet assets for US$500,000 ^{[12] [13]} and merged it with News.me, a social news reading app. Digg was purchased by BuySellAds, an advertising company, for an undisclosed amount in April 2018. ^[14]
• In April 2013, the company acquired a majority stake in Instapaper, then sold it to Pinterest in 2016. ^[15]

Since 2016, Betaworks has operated **Camp**, a thematic 13-week in-residence program in NYC that provides pre-seed funding (up to $500K), mentorship, and product development support to early-stage startups building frontier technologies. ^{[16] [17]}

References

1. Richardson, Vanessa (October 1, 2012). "Betaworks Uses Creative Methods to Find and Fund the Next Big Idea". Entrepreneur . Archived from the original on October 9, 2012.
2. Perez, Sarah (December 30, 2010). "News.me, Betaworks & NYT's Stealthy Social News Project, Starts Accepting Invite Requests". ReadWriteWeb . Archived from the original on September 19, 2012.
3. Shah, Agam (March 11, 2010). "Intel Invests in Social Media Incubator Betaworks". IDG News Service Via PCWorld. Archived from the original on January 20, 2018.
4. Wortham, Jenna (May 2, 2010). "In New York, a Tech Incubator Becomes a Hub of Collaboration". The New York Times . Archived from the original on September 12, 2015.
5. Hempel, Jessi (January 13, 2009). "Reinventing the tech incubator". CNNMoney.com . Archived from the original on October 20, 2012.
6. Behringer, Allison. "The Intern Podcast". Archived from the original on 2016-08-28.
7. Chaykowski, Kathleen. "Pinterest Focuses On Articles With Instapaper Acquisition". Forbes . Archived from the original on 2017-12-01.
8. "Bloglovin passes 2M members and buckles down for life beyond Google Reader". 15 March 2013. Archived from the original on 7 March 2016.
9. Popper, Ben (20 March 2013). "Betaworks' Giphy takes on Google in the red-hot market for GIF search". Archived from the original on 31 July 2017.
10. Gartenberg, Chaim (2020-05-15). "Facebook is buying Giphy and integrating it with Instagram". The Verge. Retrieved 2020-05-15.
11. "Facebook buys popular GIF platform Giphy for $400 million". Digital Trends. May 15, 2020. Retrieved May 15, 2020.
12. Albanesius, Chloe (July 12, 2012). "Betaworks Buys Digg, Will Fold Into News.me". PC Magazine . Archived from the original on December 2, 2016.
13. Walker, Joseph; Ante, Spencer E. (July 13, 2012). "Once a Social Media Star, Digg Sells for $500,000". The Wall Street Journal . Archived from the original on December 15, 2014.
14. "The beloved Digg, once the chief rival to Reddit, was just sold to an advertising tech company". Business Insider. April 25, 2018. Archived from the original on 23 September 2018. Retrieved 23 September 2018.
15. "The next generation of Instapaper – Marco.org". Archived from the original on 2014-08-03.
16. https://www.betaworks.com/camp
17. https://www.betaworks.com/camp/application