HackerNoon raises $250k at $50 million valuation from Forward Research

HackerNoon, a technology publishing platform that publishes about blockchain, crypto and Web3, has raised $250,000 from Forward Research, the leading R&D firm for Arweave.

According to details announced today, Monday May 15, 2023, the investment follows Forward Research’s purchase of 5,728 shares of the Hackernoon common stock. The shares were sold at $42.55 per share, and at a $50 million pre-money valuation, the company said.

HackerNoon shares previously sold at $8.20 during the company’s equity crowdfunding in 2019, and at $11.35 at its strategic investment in 2020.

HackerNoon backs up entire library onto Web3

David Smooke, CEO of HackerNoon, said in a statement that the partnership with Forward Research will help his company advance its publishing with Web3 technologies. So, as part of the partnership, HackerNoon agreed to back up its entire library of content on Arweave’s decentralised storage network.

The move will see the platform’s content become permanently available on Web3, with the company having recently surpassed the 1 billion+ published words. The integration with the Arweave ecosystem cost approximately $58, Smooke noted, adding that the long term goal is to drive the costs even lower.

He added:

“We’re still in the very early days of a truly decentralized internet, but when it comes to hosting and distributing digital text, we’re thrilled to be a small part of driving that cost towards zero.”

NFTs and other Web3 integrations already live on HackerNoon

As highlighted above, HackerNoon plans to use the investment to boost its integration with Web3. However, the platform had already introduced features such as sign up/login with their wallets and NFTs as profile photos and story embeds as part of its march towards the new technology.

It also has NFT badges for winners at its annual Noonies Tech Awards, crypto price pages for Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital assets and blockchain game rankings for the likes of Axie Infinity and Gods Unchained.

HackerNoon was founded in 2016 and counts over 35,000 contributing writers, and a reported 4 million monthly readers.