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Reproduced from Flashes & Flames: The Global Media Business Weekly.

Semafor: back-to the-future winner

Semafor this week celebrated its third anniversary with performance stats (and our own estimates) that underline its distinction as a US-based, global digital news provider which:

• Is profitable

• Has scarcely spent 60% of its $34mn initial investment

• Has doubled its revenue for three consecutive years, to some $45-50mn in 2025

• Has 1mn non-paying ‘subscribers’

Its no-polarisation, bipartisan platform exploits not just consumer disenchantment with news bias and fake content but also the strong preference for brevity, especially among digital-native audiences. That’s why Semafor has been able to recruit star reporters from well-known news brands, while employing just 50 journalists (and 85 total headcount). The profitability is, of course, down to this quality-quantity balance. It’s a business model that challenges legacy news brands which have print editions and traditional staffing to support – and a stubborn tendency simply to replicate their print content online.

But, even among digital-only news providers, Semafor is a very different kind of startup, not least because it’s funded by an ambitious events strategy where conferences (large and small) are a core part of the company, not an ancillary activity. Semafor launched 50 events in its first year and 12 even before its news service began in 2022. This year, it will operate more than 100 conferences accounting for some 60% of the company’s revenue.

But there’s something else.

All the Semafor events are invitation-only. In a strategy reminiscent of the controlled circulation policies of former B2B trade magazines, the tens of thousands of delegates who will have attended the conferences this year will be paid for by sponsors. It really is back to the future.

It’s a smart strategy whose rising success is best measured by Semafor’s World Economy Summit, held annually in Washington DC. What started as a gathering of 50 of the leading CEOs in the US was this year attended by 300 of them, among an audience of some 3,000 for the three-day event. In 2026, it will be five days.

What is Semafor’s largest event (accounting for an estimated 20% of all revenue) audaciously seeks to challenge the 54-year-old World Economic Forum (WEF), in Davos, Switzerland. US critics, in particular, sometimes view the commanding Alpine event as frustratingly expensively, remote and cold. But WEF is believed to generate some $500mn in revenue and as much as $400mn of EBITDA. Yes.

The seemingly charitable Davos event is, therefore, one of the world’s larger (and most profitable) media companies and a juicy target. The growth of Washington DC as a business centre (as well as the US centre of political power) adds to the tailwind for the Semafor challenger.

It’s less than three years since former Bloomberg Media CEO Justin Smith and journalist Ben Smith (ex BuzzFeed, Politico and the New York Times) launched Semafor with the aim of providing audiences with “an unparalleled level of journalistic transparency through innovative new forms, cutting through the noise of the news cycle with smart, distilled views and exploring competing perspectives across borders for a curious, new global audience.” 

That has meant clarifying the difference between fact and opinion, quoting and linking to a wide variety of sources, and taking a global perspective rather than an American one. Semafor seeks to be an antidote to polarised news coverage with its “Semaform” sections on: The News, The Reporter’s View, Room for Disagreement, and Notable, some of the best other writing on the subject. It’s (sort of) targeting the New York Times, The Guardian and the Financial Times in a bid to become a global news source, ultimately, for the estimated 200mn college-educated, English-speaking readers around the world.

Semafor’s level of ambition and its determination to avoid polarisation was illustrated by its financial backing from a wide-ranging group of venture investors, philanthropists, media owners and corporates, reported to include: KKR founder Henry Kravis, Charles Koch, Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo), David Rubenstein (Carlyle Group), David Bradley (Atlantic Media), Jamal Daniel (Al-Monitor), Jorge Paulo Lemann (3G Capital), Ric Elias (Red Ventures), Jessica Lessin (The Information), Gallup, Mastercard, Tata, Qualcomm, and Hyundai.

The backers have been described as having “a shared sense of responsibility to support quality, independent global news” despite clear diversity of political views. You have to believe that these founding shareholders are even more impressed by the success of the Semafor business model than they were four years ago when it was a dreamy idea. That, presumably, might give the founders some easy-access funding options to accelerate their global strategy ‘as and when’.

The initial funding had actually been $44mn but Semafor chose to return the $10mn it had received from convicted crypto trader Sam Bankman-Fried – and is believed still to have at least $10mn in the bank. This really is a different kind of digital news startup.

It’s a too-obvious contrast with the egregious BuzzFeed and Vice, the best-known of a host of media startups, arguably, spoiled by unrealistic ambitions fuelled by an excess of venture cash.

By contrast, the solid experience and serious strategy of the Semafor founders shines through their business model. Earlier this year, the CEO said: “We always knew that this was a generational mission and not a short-term campaign. That’s how we structured the company and all of us in Semafor are committed, for example, to a 10-year vesting period for our equity. My co-founder, Ben Smith, and I shook hands and said ‘Okay, this is gonna take at least 10 years. It’s probably gonna take 20 years, but let’s just start with 10 years’. But the key challenge is to attract and retain the best talent. That’s where we have done so well because it wasn’t clear to us initially that – as a young startup – we would be able to recruit the greatest financial reporter Liz Hoffman and Reed Albergotti, the leading AI reporter from the Wall Street Journal, and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, from the FT. But we have done that.”

Almost everything about this 21st century news group is different.

This week, Justin Smith told the FIPP World Media Congress, in Madrid: “Well, we are different. We’re a consumer-facing news brand but we are running it like a B2B media company. That’s part of the innovation in our business model. We are as diversified, events-led and community-focused as B2B companies. Events now generate a majority of our revenue which, of course, is very profitable. But we’re successful because it all starts with the quality of our journalism and how it attracts a very, very discerning audience of CEOs and C-suite executives. Just three years in, 475 of the Fortune 500 CEOs are readers of Semafor, reading our direct email newsletters. The engagement is incredibly high.”

As he outlined expansion plans for the Middle East, Asia and Africa, with future growth also in the EU, Smith told the FIPP audience of publishers: ‘We see readers who need products that are not being offered by traditional media. We see advertisers and sponsors that want new types of engagement with this audience. It’s not a locked-up monopoly market. It’s a very disrupted market. The changes that everyone’s experiencing are so profound and that creates tons of opportunity for new, innovative players to come and provide something different that’s user-driven and smart.”

Happy Birthday, Semafor.

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