Glens Falls Chronicle Serving the Glens Falls/Lake George region; Warren, Washington and northern Saratoga counties since 1980
Axios Media Trends on Tuesday broke the story nationally that RocaNews, the Internet news business co-founded in 2020 by Glens Falls native Max Frost, “has raised $4.4 million in a seed round led by Ori Allon, the co-founder and executive chairman of Compass Real Estate.”
Max, son of Chronicle owners Mark Frost and Sandra Hutchinson and brother of The Chronicle’s Zander Frost, is Roca President and Chief Operating Officer.
Roca’s own press release said that besides raising $4.4-million, it “acquired news tech company River,” in which Mr. Allon previously invested, and that Roca will combine its “booming online platform” with River’s AI and Web3 technology.
Also, “the funding and acquisition enable Roca to hire writers and developers to expand its news offerings and launch a social news platform that solves the issues plaguing legacy news —
“Divisive and out-of-touch content; outdated platforms; and business models that incentivize short-term clicks and damaging ideologies. These problems have generated record levels of division and distrust in the media.”
Max Frost, Max Towey and Billy Carney launched RocaNews in August 2020.
They have now relocated from Washington, D.C. to office space in Manhattan.
Axios says Roca now “has 8 employees and is budgeted for 15 employees by the end of the year.”
@ridethenews, Roca’s Instagram account, gained over 1-million followers in roughly six months in 2021.
Their daily email newsletter has over 50,000 subscribers.
Roca says it “delivers concise, non-partisan news to its global audience.”
It says it “has the highest user engagement of any news platform on social media, with a rate 4x that of Barstool and Morning Brew, 8x that of ViceNews, and 10x that of CNN.”
Investor Mr. Allon is a tech entrepreneur who founded and sold companies to Twitter and Google, as well as Compass, a real estate technology platform that went public last year. It has a market cap of around $3.2-billion.
Max Frost said Mr. Allon first approached RocaNews. “Someone recommended our page to him, and he followed it and immediately became a fan.”
Mr. Allon was already invested in news company, River. After a few months, Max said, “we ended up working out a deal, wherein we would acquire [River’s] tech and their team, and essentially merge it with our content strategy to try to create the dominant news platform.”
River’s investors, who are now Roca shareholders, also include “Founders Fund, .406 ventures, Scooter Braun and others,” said the Roca press release.
Max says of River, “They were trying to solve the same problem as us, which is that news is inconvenient, the content is not good, it’s biased, it’s partisan, you don’t feel like you’re getting a full slate of information. You feel like you’re getting what someone else wants to show you.”
“We’re bringing the future to the news,” he said. “We’re going to create a gamified social news experience.”
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