The business-to-business media company Workweek has raised an additional $17 million to fund the expansion of its newsletter platform, founder and chief executive Adam Ryan tells ADWEEK.
The raise, financed by Next Coast Ventures with participation from Aperiam Ventures, comes two years after the company raised $12.5 million in its Series A in June 2024. In total, Workweek has raised $36.5 million.
The company declined to share its updated valuation. It generates “north of $20 million” in revenue, per Ryan, and is not profitable.
Rather than built around a core editorial staff, Workweek operates as a series of branded franchises, each led by a “practitioner creator,” its term for an industry expert who writes about their work while still maintaining their primary job.
Currently, the Workweek ecosystem consists of five verticals whose content is produced by eight practitioner creators. The verticals include finance, human resources, marketing, commerce, and healthcare, and each has distinct branding—its human resources franchise, for instance, is called I Hate It Here and written by chief people officer Hebba Youssef.
Across these franchises, Workweek has around 150,000 audience members, each of whom has to apply and be vetted to join the community. This filtration process enables Workweek to ensure that, for example, only HR professionals are reading I Hate It Here, creating industry-specific communities that bolster its appeal to endemic advertisers, according to Ryan.
With its new round of funding, Workweek aims to dramatically increase the number of franchises and practitioner creators by making its content-creation tools available to anyone in the network. It already has 35 new newsletters prepared to launch and anticipates that “thousands” more practitioner creators will launch their own email products over the coming year, per Ryan.
“Before we were a content platform, where creators created content and we put it in the platform,” he said. “Now we are a newsletter platform.”
A B2B newsletter platform
For creators, the appeal of launching on Workweek, compared to rival platforms like Substack or Beehiiv, comes down to the audience.
The natural industry alignment created by the franchise structure means that practitioner creators are creating content specifically for an audience of their own peers. This creates a tighter sense of community than writing for a general audience, as well as drives up the value of its advertising inventory. It also means that new authors have a preexisting community of potential subscribers to tap.
“We’ve been building our ad platform for two and a half years,” said Ryan. “What we’ve done is identify about 81% of subscribers to who they are and the company they work for. For advertisers, we can promise them that every impression is someone in their industry.”
