Betaworks is an American

startup studio A startup studio, also known as a startup factory, or a startup foundry, or a venture studio, is a studio-like company that aims at building several companies in succession. This style of business building is referred to as "parallel entrepreneurshi ...

and seed stage

venture capital Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which ha ...

company based in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

that invests in network-focused, consumer-facing media businesses. Its hybrid investor/builder model has led to both investments in fast-growing startups like

Tumblr Tumblr (stylized as tumblr; pronounced "tumbler") is an American microblogging and social networking website founded by David Karp in 2007 and currently owned by Automattic. The service allows users to post multimedia and other content to a sho ...

Airbnb Airbnb, Inc. ( ), based in San Francisco, California, operates an online marketplace focused on short-term homestays and experiences. The company acts as a broker and charges a commission from each booking. The company was founded in 2008 b ...

Groupon Groupon is an American global e-commerce marketplace connecting subscribers with local merchants by offering activities, travel, goods and services in 13 countries. Based in Chicago, Groupon was launched there in November 2008, launching soon af ...

and

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

as well as more exclusive stakes in internally built startups such as

Chartbeat Chartbeat is a technology company that provides data and analytics to global publishers. The company was started in 2009 and is headquartered in New York City, US. The software as a service (SaaS) company integrates code into the websites of publi ...

Bitly Bitly is a URL shortening service and a link management platform. The company Bitly, Inc. was established in 2008. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens 600 million links per month, for use in social networking, SMS, and ...

and

SocialFlow SocialFlow is a social media optimization platform for leading brands and publishers. The company uses the Twitter firehose, click data derived from its proprietary link proxy, along with proprietary algorithms, to optimize the delivery of mess ...

. Betaworks was founded in 2007 by John Borthwick. It has also recently come into the limelight a little more with The Intern

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

, hosted and produced by Allison Behringer. The podcast recounts a young woman beginning her career in the world of technology. In 2016, Betaworks sold its Instapaper product to the social media scrapbooking site, Pinterest.

Studio

Current: *

Giphy Giphy ( ), styled as GIPHY, is an American online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound that resemble animated GIF files. History Beginnings and early history Giphy was founded ...

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 *

Activate (app) Activate (formerly Bloglovin') is a platform that allows users to read, organize, and discover their favorite blogs on mobile and desktop. It is a design-focused platform that aggregates feeds from sources with RSS feeds, allowing users to disco ...

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. * In July 2012, the company acquired the

Digg Digg, stylized in lowercase as digg, is an American news aggregator with a curated front page, aiming to select stories specifically for the Internet audience such as science, trending political issues, and viral Internet issues. It was launch ...

brand and internet assets for US$500,000 and merged it with News.me, a social news reading app. * In April 2013, the company released

Dots Directly observed treatment, short-course (DOTS, also known as TB-DOTS) is the name given to the tuberculosis (TB) control strategy recommended by the World Health Organization. According to WHO, "The most cost-effective way to stop the spread of T ...

, a video game downloaded over 10 million times. Former: *

, which provides realtime analytics to websites and blogs. It shows visitors, load times, and referring. *

, which that allows users to shorten, share, and track links (URLs). Reducing the URL length makes sharing easier. *

, which optimizes the real-time value of content. * In April 2013, the company acquired a majority stake in

Instapaper Instapaper is a social bookmarking service that allows web content to be saved so it can be "read later" on a different device, such as an e-reader, smartphone, or tablet. The service was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment. In April 2013, Arment ...

, before selling it to

Pinterest Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboard ...

in 2016.

References

Business incubators of the United States Venture capital firms of the United States Privately held companies based in New York City Financial services companies established in 2007 {{US-finance-company-stub