Automotive media company Car Throttle has raised $1.6m to fuel its expansion and take its community of car fans to the next level.
The London-based startup is one of the largest automotive websites in the world, boasting over 1m Facebook fans and 300,000 YouTube subscribers. Since its 2008 launch, the publication dedicated to car enthusiasts has focused on doing exactly that – being a publication.
New publications on the cards
Now, however, it’s getting set to leverage its editorial model to launch new publications across a number of different topics.
“This latest funding round allows us to continue building what we believe is the future of publishing; focusing on niches, like automotive, and growing rock-solid communities with the right balance of editorial content and user-generated posts,” says Adnan Ebrahim, Car Throttle’s 24-year-old founder and CEO.
Adnan started Car Throttle as a blog whilst finishing his studies at UCL. Since graduating and deciding to take the publication on full-time, he has grown his young team to eight people.
Part of Car Throttle’s unique offering is the user generated content and discussions that the platform hosts. It currently gets around 500 user posts and 2,000 comments per day, keeping the audience incredibly engaged with the publication.
Moving into new verticals
The investment comes from Redalpine, alongside Passion Capital and Facebook’s first international employee Blake Chandlee. It comes 18 months after its previous raise of $550k.
Adnan is keeping tight lipped about what topics the team will be applying its model to but Chandlee believes the company is one that has a huge amount of potential away from its automotive origins:
“There is huge growth right now in vertical communities, particularly in building the technology which powers user-generated content around tight niches. Car Throttle has identified a community of petrolheads who are currently underserved by existing broader platforms.”