Labrador CMS raises up to $25 million to help online newspapers grow

Labrador CMS has grown from 50 to over 200 online newspapers in three years. The publishing system has a visual no-code approach that makes it quick and easy to use. The system is made by journalists for journalists.

Labrador CMS has been a success in Norway and is the market leader. The company is now raising investor capital to offer the system to a growing international market. The target group is online newspapers, broadcasters and magazines that are too big for WordPress. Common problems in the industry are high development costs and intricate custom publishing systems that require an internal development department or expensive consultants. Labrador CMS solves this by providing a ready-made solution that can be deployed without development, or customized to the needs of the online newspaper.

The platform is a SaaS (software in the cloud) platform developed in Norway, handling the publishing needs of both large national publications with hundreds of employees and smaller niche magazines.

Labrador CMS has now raised up to NOK 25 million in a two-part financing round led by venture capital company Skagerak Capital and supported by TV2 Invest. Aller Media and TV2 are already the main owners of the company.

- Labrador is designed to give journalists and editors professional freedom. Now we're ready to welcome international customers at scale. We've been investing for years in robust cloud solutions, machine learning and an article and cover page editing engine. This software doesn't require extensive training. The reward is that editors and journalists who try the system love it," says Jan Thoresen, Chairman of Publishlad and Labrador CMS.

The software supports both quick breaking news and visual articles for long reads. Labrador CMS can be used in conjunction with personalization algorithms, run fully automatically or manually or both. A large Swedish customer measured that the time to produce an article was reduced by 25% and time spent on front page editing dropped by 62.5%.

- Experienced media people often say to us after seeing the system: This is exactly what we've been looking for. They love it, so Labrador is very easy to sell. It's not surprising when customers also end up saving money," says Jon Reidar Hammerfjeld, CEO of Publishlab and CEO of Labrador CMS.

Labrador CMS runs on self-healing servers that are spread across multiple countries to provide very high uptime for customers. News websites in particular rely on being fast and available all the time. Economists also see this as a sustainable investment, offering a range of tools that scale better and cheaper.

- We believe technological innovations contribute positively to both the planet and people. Labrador CMS is an innovative software with the potential to scale rapidly in multiple markets," says partner Espen Kjeldsen at Skagerak Capital

Customers range from smaller to larger publishers, Computer World, Forskning.no and Elle Magazine to Dagbladet.no, TV2.no and GB News. Labrador CMS is now the core system for over 200 online newspapers in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Belgium and Chile.

In 2018 and 2022, Labrador CMS was nominated by Digiday Media Awards as Europe's Best Publishing Platform. The system has won a number of tenders and competitions against other major competitors.

The company will use the investment to scale internationally and automate the import of new customers.

Skagerak Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in leading companies and helps them grow sustainably. For more than a decade, the team has built successful start-ups together with talented entrepreneurs. Through six different funds and over a billion in assets under management, Skagerak has gained extensive experience in developing companies into international successes. They have invested in over 40 companies and made more than a dozen exits. Skagerak Capital evaluates 400 companies each year and invests in one percent of them.