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Evan Williams' media startup Medium raises $25M

The publishing platform that's a mix between Twitter and Blogger gets a hefty wad of cash in venture capital funding.

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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.
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Dara Kerr
Medium co-founder Evan Williams. Dan Farber/CNET

About a year ago, Twitter and Blogger co-founder Evan Williams launched a new startup called Medium. The idea was simple: create a platform that's a mix between the 140-character social network and the blogging platform that caters to anyone who has something to say. Now, this publishing tool is about to go through a growth spurt.

According to Recode, the startup just closed a $25 million round of funding, which is a hefty amount of money considering the average deal size is around $9 million.

The funding comes from a host of venture capital firms and investors such as Google Ventures' Kevin Rose, SV Angel's Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Peter Chernin, Tim O'Reilly, Michael Ovitz, Gary Vaynerchuk, Betaworks, Code Advisors, and CAA Ventures and Science. The largest contribution came from Greylock Partners, which is known for investing in companies like Facebook and LinkedIn.

With the funding, Medium is also getting two new board members -- David Sze and Josh Elman -- who are general partners at Greylock Partners.

The money is said to be going toward paying for more office space in San Francisco, hiring, and infrastructure scaling. Before this round of funding, Williams was the primary investor behind Medium via an incubator he co-founded called The Obvious Corporation. Williams became a billionaire during Twitter's initial public offering last November.