Tagged: publishing
29 results
Ghost
Ghost is an open-source publishing platform that lets writers, journalists and creators run a website, send email newsletters and sell paid memberships from one place. Built on Node.js and released under the MIT license, it is stewarded by the nonprofit Ghost Foundation and funded entirely by its users through Ghost(Pro) managed hosting - taking 0% of creators' subscription revenue.
New Moon Girls
New Moon Girls is an award-winning, ad-free magazine and moderated online community created by and for girls (and femme-identified kids) ages 8 to 14. Founded in 1992 by Nancy Gruver and Joe Kelly for their twin daughters, roughly 95% of its content is written and illustrated by girls themselves, covering everything from body image and activism to art, recipes, and women's history. It has grown from a Duluth, Minnesota print quarterly into a global digital platform where girls publish their work, run polls, and support one another in a safe, feminist, no-advertising space.
The Business of Fashion
The Business of Fashion (BoF) is a London-based global media and intelligence company covering the fashion, beauty and luxury industries. Founded by Imran Amed in 2007 as a blog written from his flat in Notting Hill, BoF has grown into an authoritative platform that combines agenda-setting journalism, paid professional memberships, data and advisory work through BoF Insights, online masterclasses, the BoF Careers job marketplace, and marquee events like BoF VOICES and the BoF 500. The Financial Times led its Series B round in 2019, and the company reaches readers and members in more than 200 countries.
Created by Humans
Created by Humans is a San Francisco startup building a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators sell the rights to their work for AI training, reference, and transformation - and get paid for it. Founded by former Scribd CEO Trip Adler, the platform lets rights holders claim their books (by ISBN or upload), set the terms under which AI companies may use them, and track usage and payments, positioning licensing as an alternative to lawsuits between creators and AI developers.
Salesforce Has a Newsroom. Now Your Series B Does Too.
YesPress Newsroom gives growth-stage companies the same always-on publishing engine that Fortune 500 firms run — without the massive comms team. It turns launches, hires, partnerships, transcripts, and founder interviews into editorial stories engineered to be cited by journalists, analysts, and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Plans start free to claim, with full newsrooms from $750/month.
Spiegel & Grau
Spiegel & Grau is a New York independent, multi-platform publisher founded by veteran editors Celina 'Cindy' Spiegel and Julie Grau. After Penguin Random House shuttered their acclaimed imprint in 2019, the pair relaunched as an indie house in 2021, deliberately capping their list at 15-20 books a year so each title gets full editorial care across print, audio, podcast, and screen. The house treats a story as an asset to be developed across formats rather than a single book to be printed, and its very first independent release, Catherine Raven's 'Fox and I,' hit the New York Times bestseller list out of the gate.
Tertulia
Tertulia is a New York-based book discovery and commerce startup that turns the internet's endless chatter about books into personalized reading recommendations, then lets you buy the book in a couple of taps. Named after the informal literary salons of Spanish cafes, it scans social media, podcasts, critics and the wider web to surface the titles people are actually talking about, pairs that with human curation, and wraps the whole thing in a community co-op that lets avid readers become part-owners of the store. In 2025 it expanded beyond readers to authors with Tertulia for Authors, an all-in-one website builder and marketing platform.
Sinai.ai
Sinai.ai is an AI-native reading platform turning books into interactive, multimodal experiences through its trademarked aiBook format. Readers can converse with the text, generate study guides and quizzes, translate into dozens of languages, and switch between reading and listening - all on fully licensed publisher content. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco, the company closed a $1.45M pre-seed round in April 2026.
Lucky Gunasekara
Lucky Gunasekara is the co-founder and CEO of Miso.ai, an AI media lab that builds private answer engines for news publishers and learning platforms. A trained interaction designer who once built an RSS crawler to track global disease outbreaks, he now partners with 45-50+ publishers worldwide on what he calls 'liquid content' - adaptive, machine-readable information that pays royalties back to the writers and sources it draws from. His pitch to the news industry is blunt: AI is an asteroid coming for all of us, so we had better get to dinner and figure it out together.
Celina "Cindy" Spiegel
Celina "Cindy" Spiegel is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spiegel & Grau, the independent New York publishing house she runs with her longtime partner Julie Grau. Over a 30-plus year editing career she helped launch the literary careers of James McBride, Khaled Hosseini, Bryan Stevenson, Chang-rae Lee and Gary Shteyngart, and edited bestsellers by Yuval Noah Harari, Yann Martel and Dan Pink. After Penguin Random House shut down their acclaimed imprint in 2019, Spiegel and Grau rebuilt it from scratch in 2020 as an independent house publishing 15 to 20 books a year alongside original audiobooks and podcasts.
Hanz Panther
Hanz Panther is listed as Co-Founder and CEO of NewCo, a business-event production company built around an 'inside-out' festival format that swaps the convention-hall stage for the open doors of working companies. Operating at the intersection of media, publishing, and live events, NewCo turns cities into temporary campuses where the public walks into real offices instead of watching keynotes. Panther's public footprint is thin, but the role places him inside one of the more distinctive experiments in how modern business gatherings are produced.
Sebastian Cwilich
Sebastian Cwilich is the founder and CEO of Tertulia, a book-discovery company that uses machine learning to surface the books people are actually talking about online. An Argentine-born physicist who spent years at AT&T Labs before reinventing himself in the art market, he co-founded Artsy and built it into the world's largest online fine-art marketplace as its president and COO. With Tertulia he set out to do for books what Artsy did for art: turn scattered conversation into discovery. The company launched in 2022 with $6M in seed funding led by AlleyCorp and, by 2025, pivoted toward author services with a popular automated website builder.
Alastair Adam
Alastair Adam is the co-founder and Co-CEO of FlatWorld, the Boston-based publisher on a mission to bring US college textbook prices back down to earth. A Cambridge-trained lawyer who started in London M&A, he spent two decades advising the information and publishing world before buying the assets of the old Flat World Knowledge in 2016 and rebuilding it. Today FlatWorld's peer-reviewed, low-cost titles are used by faculty at well over 1,500 North American institutions. He also chairs the board of PLOS, the nonprofit open-science publisher.
beehiiv
beehiiv is a newsletter platform founded by ex-Morning Brew engineers. It provides an all-in-one infrastructure for creators and publishers to build, grow, and monetize newsletters, websites, and podcasts. Unlike competitors like Substack, beehiiv does not take a revenue cut from creator subscriptions, instead monetizing through flat SaaS fees and its native ad network. It powers over 130,000 newsletters and generates over $30M in annual revenue.
Jacob Cohen Donnelly
Jacob Cohen Donnelly is the founder of A Media Operator, a subscription publication, podcast, and conference for the people who run digital media companies. He started it in August 2019 as a weekend Substack while holding down full-time roles at CoinDesk and then Morning Brew, where he became Publisher. In 2024 he went all-in, rebuilt AMO into a five-person media business doing roughly $1 million in revenue, and turned the annual AMO Summit into the room media executives consider essential to be inside.
Amit Dayal
Amit Dayal is Vice President and General Manager of Adobe's Digital Advertising, Learning, and Publishing Business - a portfolio that puts him at the intersection of AdTech, streaming media, and enterprise e-learning. With 30+ years of product leadership spanning Sequent Computer Systems, Oracle, Motorola, Yahoo, Samsung Electronics, and multiple Silicon Valley startups he co-founded or built PM functions from scratch, Dayal brings a rare depth of engineering-to-executive experience to one of tech's most creative companies. Based in Bengaluru, India, he leads strategy, product management, technology, marketing, and sales for Adobe Primetime and related platforms serving major media and entertainment companies globally.
Inkitt
Inkitt is a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing and entertainment company that uses reader data and machine learning to identify breakout stories before they become hits. Writers upload fiction to Inkitt's community platform; the platform's algorithm tracks reader engagement to surface manuscripts with bestseller potential. Top stories move to Galatea, a premium immersive reading app offering ebooks, audiobooks, and chat-style fiction, and then to CandyJar, a short-drama streaming app. The result: a story-to-screen pipeline with 33 million users, a new million-dollar novel produced every four weeks, and 40x the hit-rate of traditional publishers.
Make:
Make: is the media and events company that gave the maker movement its name. Founded in 2005 by Dale Dougherty inside O'Reilly Media, it publishes Make: magazine, runs Maker Faire events around the world, and sells kits and books through the Maker Shed. After a 2019 shutdown, Dougherty restructured the business as Make: Community LLC and kept it going.
Chris Best
Chris Best is the co-founder and CEO of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has paid out hundreds of millions of dollars to independent writers. A systems engineer turned serial entrepreneur, Best previously co-founded Kik Messenger, scaling it to 300 million users before pivoting to rewrite the economics of media. Substack - which he launched in 2017 with Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi - has grown to over 5 million paid subscriptions, raised $213M in total funding including a $100M Series C in 2025, and minted more than 50 creators earning over $1 million annually on the platform.
Dale Dougherty
Dale Dougherty is the founder of Make: magazine and Maker Faire, and widely credited as the father of the Maker Movement. A co-founder of O'Reilly Media, he launched the internet's first commercial web portal (GNN) in 1993, helped popularize the term 'Web 2.0' in 2004, and coined the word 'makers' to describe hands-on creators and tinkerers. Today he leads Make: Community LLC, an organization that inspires millions through DIY technology, education, and events spanning 40+ countries.
Greg Sullivan
Greg Sullivan is the CEO and cofounder of AFAR, the award-winning travel media brand he launched in 2009 with Joe Diaz after a transformative six-week trip to India. A former corporate securities attorney, investment banker, and serial entrepreneur — he previously co-founded the world's largest-selling coin-operated basketball game manufacturer and served as President and CEO of DriveTime Automotive Group — Sullivan reinvented himself in his 40s through philosophy studies at Cambridge and a late-discovered passion for international travel. Under his leadership, AFAR has grown from a print magazine into a multiplatform media brand with a digital presence, a podcast, a nonprofit foundation (Learning AFAR), and a B Corp certification, and in 2025 expanded to Europe with the acquisition of SUITCASE Magazine.
Hamish McKenzie
Hamish McKenzie is the New Zealand-born co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack, the subscription newsletter platform that has fundamentally reshaped how writers monetize their work. A former journalist and Tesla lead writer who wrote a book about Elon Musk's EV revolution, McKenzie pivoted from covering disruption to causing it - co-founding Substack in 2017 with Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi. Today the platform hosts over 50,000 earning creators and has raised $213 million total funding including a $100M Series C. McKenzie hosts The Active Voice podcast, delivered a TED2025 talk on the future of media, and is writing a book called 'How to Save the Media' due in 2026.
Kevin Lee
Kevin Lee is an executive at Substack, the subscription newsletter and media platform based in San Francisco that reached unicorn status with a $1.1 billion valuation in 2025 after raising a $100 million Series C. Substack has grown to host over 50,000 paid publications, with creators collectively earning more than $600 million annually and 20+ million monthly active subscribers on the platform.
Substack
Substack is a subscription publishing platform that lets writers, podcasters, and video creators run paid newsletters and own the direct relationship with their readers. Founded in 2017, the company hosts thousands of paid publications, processes hundreds of millions in subscription revenue annually, and has become the default home for independent media on the internet.
Maxx Lobo
Maxx Lobo is the Chief Executive Officer of Ask Media Group, the IAC-owned digital media and performance marketing company behind Ask.com and other properties reaching 245 million people monthly. A two-decade veteran of ad-tech, cloud infrastructure, and digital media, Lobo rose through the ranks as CTO and COO/President before taking the top role in 2025. Under his operational leadership, Ask Media Group tripled its EBITDA from $50 million to over $100 million in four years, cementing his reputation as one of the more quietly effective operators in the digital media landscape.
Ahmed Kamel
Ahmed Kamel is a Cairo-born, San Francisco-based serial tech entrepreneur and Google Developer Expert in Machine Learning. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sinai.ai, an AI-native book platform that transforms static books into interactive, personalized reading experiences via its patented aiBook™ format. A 20-year software veteran, Kamel previously co-founded YOUXEL Technology (2011) and adam.ai (2017), an AI-powered meeting management platform that attracted Atlassian investment and grew 5x during COVID-19. In April 2026, Sinai.ai closed a $1.45M pre-seed round led by KAUST Innovation Ventures and DisrupTech Ventures.
Megan Casey
Megan Casey is a Partner in Investor Relations at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. A former book editor at Penguin Random House's Portfolio imprint, she pivoted through the startup world - leading content at NFX, serving as CMO at crypto custodian PolySign, and producing the Pushkin Industries podcast 'Making a Killing with Bethany McLean' - before landing at a16z where she bridges the firm's storytelling prowess with its LP relationships. She is based in Seattle, Washington.
Stephanie Zinn
Stephanie Zinn is Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads editorial strategy and audience growth across Substack, X, YouTube, and search. With over a decade in tech editorial, she previously built editorial teams from scratch at Coinbase and GitHub - generating 15M newsletter subscribers at Coinbase and launching GitHub's influential ReadME Project. She is one of the rare operators who treats clear writing not as a nice-to-have but as a core business asset.
Ev Williams
Ev Williams is the Nebraska farm boy who accidentally invented blogging, co-founded Twitter, built Medium, and is now trying to make social media actually social again with Mozi. A serial founder who has shaped how the world communicates - and who openly regrets some of what that meant - he remains one of tech's most quietly consequential figures, running Obvious Ventures, a B Corp impact fund with $585M in assets, while incubating his next idea from San Francisco.