Digital Publisher Open Road Media Raises $11,000,000 in New Funding Round
Open Road Media announced on their blog this morning that they had raised $11 million in a Series C fuding round. Investors included Open Road’s existing capital investors Kohlberg Ventures, Azure Capital, and Golden Seeds, as well as NewSpring Growth, which led the round with an $8 million investment.
In May 2010, Open Road published its first ebook from its first author, William Styron. Today, we publish and copublish just over four thousand ebooks from more than five hundred authors.
In just three short years, we have launched our marketing platform and grown our catalog. We began as an epublisher of literary fiction from authors such as Pat Conroy, Alice Walker, Iris Murdoch, Michael Chabon, and James Jones. From that strong foundation, we have expanded to verticals and genres and are now the digital home of a number of titles from a wide variety of writers including Pearl S. Buck, Dorothy L. Sayers, Virginia Hamilton, John Jakes, and Octavia E. Butler. We have also formed partnerships with independent publishers, among them Philosophical Library, MysteriousPress.com, and Albert Whitman & Company, to bring their books into the digital world.
Open Road Media got its start in publishing new digital editions of older titles. This unfortunately has brought them into conflict with legacy publishers, with the most notable case being a lawsuit over the digital rights to Julie of the Wolves, the Newberry Award winning children’s novel. That case made spalshy headlines last year but appears to have been resolved quietly and away from the public eye.
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