Simple blogging startup Posterous raises $4.4M

Posterous, a company that wants to make it super-easy for anyone to publish their own blog, has raised $4.4 million in its first round of institutional funding.

The San Francisco company’s big selling point is its simplicity — just send an email with the title, text, and media that you want to post to post@posterous.com, and Posterous handles everything else. If it’s your first time using the site, Posterous even creates your blog for you. Its closest competitor is Tumblr, but Posterous has found an audience of its own, and told TechCrunch it now has 12 million unique monthly visitors.

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The funding was led by Redpoint Ventures, where Posterous already had a connection, since Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj already backed the company as an angel investor. Trinity Ventures, SV Angel, Founder Collective, Lowercase Capital, Brian Pokorny, Aydin Senkut, and XG Ventures also participated in the funding. (Senkut is also an investor in VentureBeat.)

Posterous has now raised about $5.1 million in funding. It was incubated by Y Combinator, and in fact Y Combinator runs a blog on Posterous.