Elite Daily, a news website with 55 employees and 40 million monthly uniques, just raised a $1.5 million convertible note (a type of debt) from Greycroft, Vast Ventures, Red Sea Ventures, SocialStarts, and angel investors.
The funding is the first outside capital the startup has ever raised. Three founders, who are all younger than 30, built a media property that rivals traffic of sites such as Upworthy, Wall Street Journal and even Business Insider in just two years on a bootstrapped budget.
While undergrads at Pace University, David Arabov, 23, and Jonathan Francis, 28, pooled together $60,000 with another friend, Gerard Adams. None of them had media or technology experience, but they had a lofty ambition to create The Huffington Post for millennials.
"We were supposed to go to law school, we took the LSATS and everything," CEO David Arabov told Business Insider in an interview. "But we didn't think traditional media had done a great job of creating content online, and newer publications were pretty niche."