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Venture Capital News: Skinny Mom Fattens Up with $100K

2013-03-14
CINCINNATI, OH, Online community where moms get the skinny on fitness, food, fashion and family, has received a $100,000 investment from CincyTech.
Skinny Mom, an online community where moms get the skinny on fitness, food, fashion and family, has received a $100,000 investment from CincyTech.

The investment is part of a projected $500,000 seed-stage funding round led by CincyTech, which expects to add more to the round this year.

Skinny Mom founder and CEO Brooke Griffin will use the investment to continue building the brand by delivering daily, weekly and monthly content to her readers. She and her team of mommy bloggers are creating up to 12 new stories each day, covering the topics of Food, Fitness, Fashion & Family. Within the upcoming months, Skinny Mom will be adding a Fitness Video Index, a virtual Recipe Index, city-specific & category-specific virtual mom groups, and personal profile pages for moms to customize and interact with other moms around the country.

Griffin founded Skinny Mom in 2011 after gaining 68 pounds during her pregnancy and struggling to lose the weight. A former fitness professional and Cincinnati Bengals cheerleader, she was accustomed to being fit and felt depressed about the weight she had gained.

"I went to the Internet looking for answers, and I didn't find anything that helped me, so I started the Skinny Mom blog," Griffin said. "I really wanted to create a resource that would help other moms connect with each other and live healthier lives. The first month we had 10,000 unique visitors, so I guess it was something other moms were looking for too."

Skinny Mom's traffic has continued to skyrocket -- in February 2013, she had 837,000 unique visitors, about 60 percent coming through Pinterest. She is the most popular "mommy blogger" featured on The Cincinnati Enquirer's web site, www.Cincinnati.com, which began this week publishing a "Skinny Mom" column in the print newspaper as well.

Rahul Bawa, director of digital and software for CincyTech, has been working with Griffin since spring of 2012.

"We have been extremely impressed with the way Brooke has grown traffic as well as the amount of original content she and her team produce, which has helped her draw so many active, engaged users," Bawa said. "Brooke knows the space and connects well with her audience, which is attracting brands that want to reach moms and is helping her to grow revenue."

About Skinny Mom
Skinny Mom Inc. is a Cincinnati-based company that delivers the skinny on Fitness, Food, Fashion and Family to their online community of real moms around the country. Since 2011, Skinny Mom has been motivating and teaching moms to live healthier, happier and more fulfilling lives by sharing real mom stories, original healthy recipes, exercise videos for all fitness levels, reviews on the best products for their families, and more. For more information on Skinny Mom, visit http://www.skinnymom.com.

About CincyTech
CincyTech is a public-private seed-stage investor focused on technology-based startups in Southwest Ohio. From 2007 through 2012, it had invested $15 million in 43 startups in enterprise software, consumer Web and the life sciences and attracted another $170 million in private venture investment into those companies. It is an Entrepreneurial Signature Program of Ohio Third Frontier, a state initiative that is devoting $2.6 billion into research institution work and technology-based entrepreneurship.
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