Lightbank, the seed fund created by Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, is investing $1.5 million in Benzinga.com, a Michigan-based real-time financial news site with trading tips, as well as aggregated content from other sites such as TheStreet.com and WSJ.com, parent site of this blog.
“We like the proposition of an actionable trading information network, and we like the entrepreneurs behind Benzinga,” said Lightbank partner Paul Lee, who joined the fund earlier this year. “We think there has to be a certain brand connotation with these kinds of sites and we see that in Benzinga’s founder.”
Mr. Lee is referring to Jason Raznick, president and co-founder of Benzinga.com, a former associate at Fortress Investment Group and financial news writer who says he bootstrapped his way through the first five months of Benzinga.com.
The site, which launched in early 2010, offers mostly free financial news content as well as a variety of subcription products targeted at traders. Mr. Raznick says the site sees between two and three million page views a month and that the company is already cash flow positive, with the bulk of its revenue coming from advertising.
“I think our site is different from other sites because we’re not saying, go do this in the market, or go buy that stock. We’re offering analysis and saying, if you believe this, here are some ways to do it,” Mr. Raznick says. He says he plans to continue to grow the company, which currently has between 20 and 25 employees, and that future build-outs may include more video products on the Web site.
For Lightbank, the investment is a pivot from the seed fund’s focus on daily deals and social media management start-ups. In the past, the fund has invested in companies like Betterfly.com, a site for listing and finding professional services; Sprout Social (see coverage here), which lets clients access a single dashboard to retrieve data from their company’s Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts; and most recently, Gtrot, which mines users’ social networks like Facebook and Foursquare to help them make plans while traveling.
The Lightbank fund, which Lefkofsky and Keywell formed in the spring of 2010 following the wild success of daily deals site Groupon, has committed to invest $100 million over 10 years. Partner Mr. Lee says the group has invested in 18 start-ups to date.
