Building a digital media empire: SB Nation and The Verge owner Vox Media raises $17 million

Online media publisher extraordinaire Vox Media, which owns and operates fast-growing tech news site The Verge, sports blog network SB Nation and an upcoming game industry news outlet tentatively named Vox Games, has secured $17 million in a financing round that could end up totaling just south of $17.5 million.

Update: Conveniently, the company will today also announce the launch of the brand new SB Nation YouTube channel.

The funding round hasn’t yet been announced by the company, but we caught wind of it thanks to a Form D notice filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission last Friday. We’ve reached out to the company for more information.

The round brings Vox Media’s total funding to date to approximately $40 million.

The company is expanding fast and ferociously, but hiring tons of talented writers – and editors – to cover multiple industries is obviously a costly game. Presumably, the company needs a sizeable war chest not just for recruitment purposes but also to finance potential acquisitions and to launch new verticals down the line.

The filing identifies the company as ‘SportsBlogs, Inc.’, which is what the blog network operator used to be known as (SB Nation = SportsBlogs Nation).

The Form D notice lists Vox Media founder Markos Moulitsas and CEO and chairman Jim Bankoff (background, video interview), a former AOL exec. Two other executives at the online media company, namely VP Business Affairs and Finance Kyle Ragsdale and VP & General Counsel Lauren Fisher, are also listed.

Vox Media, which is headquartered in Washington D.C., previously raised $23 million in funding from Accel Partners, Comcast Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Allen & Company and Providence Equity Partners, as well as several angel investors.

For what it’s worth, the aforementioned SEC filing also lists Accel’s Andrew Braccia as well as Comcast Ventures’ David Zilberman.

And for your background information only: actor and angel investor Ashton Kutcher is an advisor to Vox Media.