One of the growing number of ‘talent marketplaces’ emerging online, Storyhunter has just raised $1.3m to expand its platform.
Storyhunter’s total funding has risen to $4.2m after its latest successful round saw Draper Associates, Frontier Ventures and Altair Capital jump on board.
Previous investors in Storyhunter include NFX Guild, iAngels, and 500 Startups, with the company using the additional capital to expand its freelance management system, launched earlier this year.
“From listening to clients, we learned there was an opportunity to not just connect them with experienced freelancers, but to help them manage the entire freelancer relationship, from messaging freelancers in the field to making payments to filing taxes,” said Jaron Gilinsky, CEO and co-founder of the company.
Storyhunter was founded in 2012 in Brooklyn, by a group of journalists, filmmakers and web developers hoping to negotiate their way through a world of magazine closures and general media cutbacks.
Boasting a network of more than 20,000 freelance video producers and journalists across 180 countries, Storyhunter is a variation on what has become a growing theme – one that VCs are taking a keen look at.
Crowds are good for funding, but they seem to be a major benefit in problem solving too. For example, Google is rumoured to be eyeing up Kaggle, a data science community that runs competitions to help experts solve commercial problems.
Access to a treasure trove of freelance data scientists is the obvious appeal. Another reason that Google is interested in Kaggle, perhaps, is its ongoing relationship with the platform. Earlier this month, Google and Kaggle partnered on a $100,000 machine learning competition aimed at classifying YouTube videos.
Appirio is another example, with 800,000 members covering the computer science field in a more general sense.
Elsewhere, in 2015, Algorithmia, an online marketplace that connects computer science researchers’ algorithms with developers who may have uses for them, exited its private beta.