April 6, 2009
Japanese VC Firm Mizuho Venture Capital Leads a $10 Million In Round 5 for Glam Media
Glam Media, a distributed vertical content network, and an advertising network has just announced the landing of a $10 million in round 5 funding.�� The funding was led by Japanese vc firm Mizuho Venture Capital and German joint venture that was arranged by partner, Hubert Burda Media.�� The funding is mainly for expanding the company�s Japanese and German operations.� Glam Media is a pioneer in vertical networks and connects premium brand advertisers with over 75 million unique monthly visitors worldwide. Glam�s audience has a variety of different passions that the company aims to satisfy with a network of over 700 different publishers and the company�s own flagship sites, which are glam.com and brash.com.
Glam Media has offices all over the United States and in Canada, Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Along with this funding, the total investment in Glam Media is now well over $100 million, and that does not include another $20 million in debt.�� In 2008, Glam made a couple of strategic acquisitions and keeps having a strong focus on international growth.�� Along with international growth, the company also plans to launch new side projects, such as Tinker.� Tinker is a powerful application that has the potential to go viral on the web by creating widgets.�� When an event is created, users can share its feed with embeddable widget that they can place on their websites and blogs.� These widgets allow users to see the event�s feed and then submit their own messages.�
According to Techcrunch Glam Media had slowed down payments to its publishers and made several pay cuts late last year, but Glam�s Q4 had appeared to be amazingly strong.� One month later, Glam Media had turned to be one of the fastest growing websites in the United States.� By the end of last year, Glam was reported to be the ninth largest publisher of display ads with almost 2.1 billion ad impressions per month.
According to Samir Arora, Glam Media�s chairman and CEO, the company has proven that its new media model can empower one of the fastest growing companies in this economic downturn.��
Mizuho Venture Capital is a subsidiary Mizuho Bank, which is one of Japan�s largest and most prestigious banks.�� Furthermore, in the United States, Mizuho Bank brings noteworthy insight and knowledge as one of the world�s top financial institutions.�
Furthermore, Glam has also announced the joint venture with some of Japan�s media agencies.� As far as Yukihiro Yamamura, CEO of Glam Media, Japan and Vice President of Glam Media, the company has aligned itself with some of the best advertising, media and financial institutions known around the world.�
Another sign of Glam�s rapid growth is the formation of Glam Media Germany.� Opened in July 2008, Glam has now expanded into Europe and just six months after Glam Germany was launched, loreal.de from L�OREAL Paris has reported that� Glam Germany has tripled its growth.�
According to Dr. Marcel Reichart, managing director of Hubert Burda DLD, Glam Media Germany has been quite successful after its launch and has quickly reached the position of market leader and has built a wold-class management team.�
