As any job­bing art direc­tor or account man­ag­er can tell you, more and more online adver­tis­ing agen­cies are embrac­ing high qual­i­ty con­tent mar­ket­ing. And if you’re an art direc­tor seek­ing to cre­ate that killer con­tent for your clients, you might do well to take a look at News­Cred, the New York start­up whose sophis­ti­cat­ed con­tent mar­ket­ing plat­form brings world-class con­tent into live play with cut­ting edge software.

Investor con­fi­dence 

Found­ed in 2007 by Shafqat Islam (now its CEO), Iraj Islam and Asif Rah­man, it’s just raised its biggest invest­ment to date in a $25 mil­lion Series C round led by Inter­West Part­ners. Exist­ing investors First­Mark Cap­i­tal, May­field Fund and IA Ven­tures also participated.

Hav­ing raised $15 mil­lion last year in Series B, the company’s invest­ment total now stands at $45 mil­lion. Most can­ny account man­agers would agree that this firm has got what it takes to sus­tain ven­ture capitalist’s confidence.

It’s also gar­nered a glit­ter­ing list of big name clients such as Proc­ter & Gam­ble, Bank of Amer­i­ca, Time, Inc., Blue Cross Shield, Sprint, AIG, The Hearst Cor­po­ra­tion, Xerox and Visa. With a list like that, most account man­agers would need to pinch them­selves to check if they were dreaming.

A gen­uine end-to-end pack­age 

So what’s unique about News­Cred? It offers “the full con­tent mar­ket­ing stack”, and Shafqat Islam asks a per­ti­nent ques­tion: “You know, a lot of peo­ple use the word ‘end-to-end’ with­out actu­al­ly think­ing about, What does that mean?” News­Cred, he says, offers “the full con­tent mar­ket­ing stack”, includ­ing a con­tent licens­ing busi­ness which pro­vides clients with access to con­tent owned by Get­ty Images, The New York Times and Reuters.

But fol­low­ing its “News­Room” ini­tia­tive last year, it now also has a net­work of well-paid, top qual­i­ty free­lance writ­ers who can earn up to $500 for a blog post and $1000 for an orig­i­nal researched arti­cle. These free­lancers are high­ly adept at pro­duc­ing con­tent per­fect­ly tai­lored to a brand’s needs (anoth­er New York start­up, Con­tent­ly, offers a sim­i­lar resource). But when News­Cred says it offers an “end-to-end plat­form”, it’s not kid­ding. It pro­vides every­thing from plan­ning to approvals to analytics.

The new fund­ing will go chiefly into expand­ing the startup’s sales­force, which it plans to dou­ble, to boost its posi­tion­ing in a high­ly com­pet­i­tive market.