Investment fund Newion invests 500.000 euro in publishing startup Instant Magazine. The investment will be used for further international growth.
The story of Instant Magazine, based in Alkmaar, started seven years ago in 2008 with custom magazines in Flash. With the rise of the iPad in 2012, the founders started working on a next generation platform and formally founded instant magazine in 2013. This product is a standard platform for creating digital magazines, such that the magazines work on all platforms without additional coding. Example customers include Volvo, PwC, Sunweb, ASR and Rabobank: mostly European names. According to the press release, Instant Magazine is already publishing more than 2000 magazines for 250 clients. With the new investment, CEO Daan Reijnders hopes to grow further: “Our client bases in the UK and Scandinavia are growing rapidly. We are also receiving an increasing number of enquiries from the US. We reach our clients primarily through online channels. The investment will enable us to achieve far greater reach and optimize our online sales.”
The total investment size is 500.000 euro (confirmed by founders and reported on Silicon Canals). With the money, further developments will be made to the platform and sales will be expanded. “We want to improve the editor. We now have a good content management system like editor, but our goal is a full WYSIWIG editor”. Sales wise the company hopes to grow in the rest of Europe and the United States. “For the US we are mostly looking at New York. Our target customers are corporate communications departments, and most US companies have located their communications departments in New York”.
The investment from Newion was made from their currently open fund Newion II. This fund has a total size of 50 million euros and has the European Investment Fund as their main backer. We are looking forward to see more technology investments from this fund.
Photo: from Instant Magazine’s company website