In recent years, cross-country flights have become a sort of sanctuary for us, one of the very few opportunities for heads-down productivity in the always-on-the-go world we live in today. As two of the (admittedly struggling) champions of “inbox zero”, we each dedicated a recent New York to California journey to getting caught back up on our email backlogs. Peppered throughout were all our favorite newsletters on everything from investing to sports to generative AI – Ben’s Bites, Superhuman, Homescreen, Even the Odds, Fantasy Life to name a few. And one-by-one as we scrolled through to the bottom, we both kept seeing the same 3 powerful words: Powered. By. beehiiv.

It’s no secret that the email newsletter renaissance is officially upon us. The world’s “most boringly powerful publishing platform” has experienced a resurgence in recent years as a favored source of content for the world’s 4.4 billion email users.

For consumers, the email inbox has become a content “feed,” similar to the way social platforms present users with a feed. The key difference is that the inbox gives readers deeper levels of control and privacy over the content they choose to consume. For brands, recent privacy regulation and rising costs across all digital channels have pushed them towards newsletters as a more efficient way to directly engage their customers. And for creators, the recent proliferation of collaborative and AI-centric creativity tools has resulted in a more powerful platform for writers and artists to express themselves and build their audiences.

With this renewed enthusiasm around newsletter creation and distribution, a lucrative opportunity has emerged for a disruptor platform to pave the way for the next million creators, publishers, and brands to scale and monetize their audiences. That is exactly the vision the founders of beehiiv have set out to build. And today, Lightspeed is thrilled to join them on this journey by leading beehiiv’s $12.5M Series A financing.

Brewing something new

The team behind beehiiv – co-founders Tyler Denk, Ben Hargett, and Jake Hurd – were early employees at email publishing company Morning Brew, which scaled from 50K to >3M daily subscribers before it was acquired by Insider in October 2020. They started beehiiv as a way to productize and democratize access to the newsletter publication, CMS, and audience management software stack they helped to build at Morning Brew. We have been consistently impressed by the performance-driven nature, strong growth mindset, and relentless focus on product execution exhibited by the strong team Tyler, Ben, and Jake have assembled.

Turns out that this powerful team has not only built a best-in-class product suite, but has also started to generate best-in-class business performance. Over the past year, beehiiv has scaled to $4M revenue run-rate, growing more than 40% month-over-month with a diversified revenue base (subscriptions, ads, boosts, and courses) and creator base. Their customers range from first-time creators all the up to enterprise users, including The Boston Globe, Milk Road, Cult of Mac, and Overtime Sports, and Superhuman. Even more impressive, beehiiv has scaled through a remarkable product- and community-led growth motion, with 90%+ organic acquisition to-date.

By offering the industry’s most robust content creation (with near-term plans to integrate generative AI into the creator workflow) and growth tooling, beehiiv is empowering the next era of creators. This has the potential to dramatically expand the market opportunity around email newsletters, capturing previously underserved medium- and long-tail creators in addition to the enterprise segment. The rapidly scaling supply of newsletters will serve as the foundation for the beehiiv ad network.

We believe beehiiv has the potential to build the programmatic ad network for email, similar to how multi-billion dollar ad networks have emerged on top of search and social platforms.

Companies, Customers and Creators (like us!) are swarming to beehiiv

Over the past 18 months, the beehiiv team has built the most diverse newsletter monetization feature set (including the ad network and subscriptions) and robust growth toolkit (including the recommendation network, referral program, and recently introduced boosts). This has helped the company to establish best-in-class brand affinity among millennial and Gen-Z creators.

At Lightspeed we believe the strongest signals of future success come in the form of early customer love. What first got us excited about beehiiv was not only seeing so many of our favorite newsletters switching over to the platform in recent months, but seeing those creators absolutely rave about the experience and the impact it had on their craft.

We knew we had to try the platform ourselves…and now we’re hooked. So hooked, in fact, that we’re excited to also be launching today this brand new newsletter on beehiiv, aptly named Buzzworthy 🐝.

We could not be happier to be investors in (and customers of) beehiiv, and we look forward to a long, sweet-like-honey partnership with the team!

What else is buzzin’ at Lightspeed…

As alluded to above, AI is front & center, and Lightspeed continues to put our money where our mouth is! A couple recent firm investments to highlight include Mistral AI (European LLM operator) and Contextual AI (Enterprise-focused language models).

And we recently published our firmwide AI Reading List guide for May 2023 — check it out.

Until next time!

Buzzworthy 🐝 is a regular(ish) consumer newsletter written by Nicole Quinn and Faraz Fatemi, investing partners at Lightspeed Venture Partners. We cover a little bit of everything from tech & VC to travel & lifestyle trends, and we promise to never take ourselves too seriously 😊