Group Commerce Raises Funding to Expand Its Deals Platform to Europe

Group Commerce, which has developed a platform that helps publishers sell Groupon-like offers, has raised $21 million in a third round of funding to expand to Europe.

New investor Jafco Ventures joined the round, with existing investors including Spark Capital and Carmel Ventures also participating.

As part of the news, Group Commerce said it had acquired the U.K. operations of Dealised in April, and has plans to expand to other countries, including Germany.

To date, the New York-based company has raised more than $40 million; it has 125 employees worldwide.

Despite steep competition in the daily deals space, the company has benefited by partnering with publishers, which already have a way to reach millions of potential consumers, and by doing so, eliminating huge marketing costs that other daily deals companies have experienced.

Last year, Group Commerce announced a deal with Hearst; more recently, it launched with CBS. Because of that, it says, revenues have been growing 30 percent every month for the past year.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald