Two Dutch journalistic start-ups, Blendle and De Correspondent, have attracted millions of euros in new investment which will be used to expand their services and move further internationally.

The digital news aggregator Blendle said two investors, BookSpot, a unit of Novamedia and the Danish entrepereneur Morten Strunge have invested a combined €4m in the company.

Blendle will use the money for marketing and in its new Blendle Audio service, Blendle founder Alexander Klöpping told the Financieele Dagblad.

Blendle is a Dutch online news platform that aggregates articles from a variety of newspapers and magazines and sells them on a pay-per-article basis. The company needed the new investment: shareholders’ equity was minus €1.8m at end-2016. Figures for 2017 have not yet been published.

The deal is the latest in a string of cash injections for the Amsterdam-based company.  The New York Times and Germany’s Axel Springer (Bild, Die Welt) invested €3m in the company in 2015 while last year, Japan’s Nikkei which owns the Financial Times and the Amsterdam investment club Inkef put an undisclosed sum into the company.

International

Meanwhile, De Correspondent says it has attracted $950,000 in ‘runway’ funding from the Omidyar Network for its English language project. In addition, Blue State Digital – the people behind Obama’s campaigns for president –  will be teaming up with Momkai to build the company’s global campaign, the company said.

De Correspondent was launched in September 2013 after raising more than €1 million in a crowd-funding campaign.^.The website is ad-free and focuses on in-depth articles, comment and investigative journalism.

Last March, the company announced plans to go global and said it had a $500,000 grant from two American institutions to investigate the potential.