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News Aggregator Platform Reddit raises $700 million led by Fidelity Management

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Reddit will raise up to $700 million in a fundraising round led by Fidelity Management, the social media network announced, capitalising on a surge in its financial influence to triple its valuation to more than $10 billion.

The company announced that it had already raised $410 million from Fidelity in its second funding round since the beginning of the year, when small-time traders gathered on its platform to compete with Wall Street institutions.

Reddit is a social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website based in the United States. Registered users submit content to the site, such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which are then rated positively or negatively by other users.

The traders, who began in Reddit's WallStreetBets forum but have since spread to other discussion boards, have altered how Wall Street analysts operate, causing major losses for some funds while powering huge gains in the shares of companies such as GameStop and AMC.

Reddit's value had already doubled to $6 billion in February from a year ago as a result of the trading frenzy.

Chief Executive Steve Huffman, entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, and the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz founded the San Francisco-based company in 2005.
While Reddit has been a household name on the internet for years, attracting millions of experts and enthusiasts to its niche discussion groups, it has lagged behind other major social media platforms in terms of business development.

Although a sizable sum, the $10 billion valuation pales in comparison to Twitter Inc's $52 billion valuation or Facebook Inc's $1 trillion valuation, both of which were founded around the same time as Reddit.

Reddit had over 52 million daily active users and over 100,000 communities as of January, dwarfed by Facebook's nearly 2 billion daily active users in June or Twitter's 206 million monetizable daily active users, a term for users who see ads placed on their platforms.

Reddit surpassed $100 million in advertising revenue for the first time in the second quarter, representing a nearly threefold increase over the same period last year.

Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, funds such as Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, and rap superstar Snoop Dogg are among its investors.