Bleacher Report co-founder and Elite Daily advisor Dave Nemetz raises a seed round to launch a media site for guys, Inverse
Nemetz left the sports media company in 2013, eight months after the acquisition, and spent the following year and a half deciding what to tackle next.
He advised and invested in a media startup that would later sell for ~ $50 million, Elite Daily, and advised Bustle, a media startup created by Nemetz's Bleacher Report co-founder, Bryan Goldberg.
But for the past few months, Nemetz has narrowed in on his own startup, Inverse, which launched Wednesday morning.
Inverse is a website that caters to young men and all the things they find interesting, although Nemetz swears it won't be littered with photos of scantily-clad women and centerfolds. He's co-founding the site with former Bleacher Report employees Winton Welsh, who is Inverse's CTO, Steve Marshall, who is head of product and design, and Michael Schaefermeyer and John Degner, who are senior engineers. The startup is based in San Francisco but a team of 15 writers led by Andrew Burmon, formerly of Maxim, is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Inverse has raised a seed round of financing from Elite Daily's big investor Greycroft Partners and Bleacher Report's investor Crosslink Capital. Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI), social+capital partnership, Rothenberg Ventures, and angel investors also put money into Inverse. The amount raised was not disclosed.
But does the world really need another male-targeted publication, especially when new digital media properties like LittleThings, ViralNova, Elite Daily, and Bustle have found that women rule the Internet and share the most stories?
"It feels like everyone is focusing on women now, so much so that we have a big opportunity to focus on men," Nemetz told Business Insider during a phone call Friday. "We're taking the contrarian point of view almost. Whether or not people say women share more or rule the internet, there's still another 50%o the population out there."
Nemetz admits a number of publications for men already exist, but says the category overall is "stale" and "fragmented."
"If you look at the more traditional brands from the print world, they tend to take a very prescriptive view of what their audience is. 'This is the Esquire man' or 'the Maxim man' and paint what that audience should be," Nemetz says. "We're trying to celebrate the diversity of that audience and all the niche things they belong to. If you read Inverse, you don't have to wear this tie and listen to this music. It's about celebrating different points of view and building a publication from the ground up that's built for today's guy."
Here's Inverse.com.
