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Thrillist Media Group raises a whopping $13M

Known as the DailyCandy-for-men, the newsletter and e-commerce site continues to grow -- this time with funding led by Oak Investment Partners.

Dara Kerr Former senior reporter
Dara Kerr was a senior reporter for CNET covering the on-demand economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado, went to school in New York City and can never remember how to pronounce gif.
Dara Kerr
2 min read

In what started out as a small newsletter to 600 friends has grown into a company worthy of $13 million in Series A funding.

Thrillist Media Group, a man-about-town newsletter and e-commerce company, announced today that it has raised this wad of cash with funding led by Oak Investment Partners that has been joined by Lerer Ventures and Pilot Group. What's more, Fred Harman from Oak will be joining Thrillist's board of directors.

Thrillist was co-founded by Ben Lerer who comes from a family that knows about media. He's the son of Ken Lerer, who co-founded the Huffington Post (which has also received funding from Oak in the past). This round of funding is Thrillist's first since Lerer launched the company in 2005, receiving just under $2 million from Pilot.

"It's amazing what we've been able to accomplish with such a small investment and I think that is a testament to what you can expect from us with this new round of funding," co-founder of Thrillist.com Adam Rich said in a statement. "We're going to continue to invest intelligently into creating great content that our audience loves -- and we have big plans for evolving the Thrillist experience on the web, as well as on mobile and in video."

Thrillist acquired the guy-oriented shopping site JackThreads in 2010, adding products to its digital newsletter. It has since been able to make some serious revenue and it is currently on pace to make $60 million this year -- up from $33 million in 2011.

"We've had an incredible response with our private label collections and we definitely plan to lean hard into launching additional in-house brands over the next year, as well as to continue our expansion into new merchandise categories," co-founder of JackThreads Jason Ross said in a statement.

Oak has been around since the late 1970's and has since invested $9 billion in roughly 500 companies worldwide. Besides Huffington Post and Thrillist, it has also invested in Bleacher Report, Demand Media, Federated Media, KAYAK Software, MobiTV, and more.