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Welcoming 9gag

By Tony Conrad, July 30, 2012

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We’re very excited to welcome the brilliant and ultra-fun 9GAG to the True Ventures family. 9GAG is very intelligently leveraging the social graph for simple, elegant sharing of humor content. In the simplest terms, 9GAG is curated humor. The site allows you to like, tweet and share on Facebook your favorite memes, submitted by users out to share a laugh and have some fun.

We first met 9GAG founder Ray Chan through Kevin Rose, founder of Milk (a True investment recently acquired by Google), and were immediately impressed by Ray’s energy, passion and intelligence. Though he lives in Hong Kong, Ray spent several months working at Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, where his 9GAG platform started gaining traction.

By the time Ray came to see us at True last December, 9GAG was scaling at an impressive level—40 million unique visitors and 1.2 billion page views monthly. Those are seriously outdated numbers now, as 9GAG currently has over 70 million unique visitors per month. 9GAG is, in a way, an atypical investment for True, in that we’re used to funding companies at inception. While 9GAG is indeed a young company, it has already scaled to a significant level. Humor curation is hard to scale, and 9GAG’s killer numbers have us very excited.

Many amazing investors join True in supporting 9GAG in this round. The list is too long to mention everyone, but we’re pleased to be co-investing once again with the likes of Freestyle Capital, Chris Sacca, Scott Banister, Kevin Rose, David Tisch, Naval Ravikant, Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, Philip Kaplan and several others. 9GAG’s combination of an energetic young founder, a strong team, and impressive scale to this point make it a powerful social platform that we are proud to support.

Congratulations Ray and team, and welcome to the True family!

Read more about 9GAG on AllThingsD and VatorNews.