Huffington has written recent books about health and sleep issues, and her start-up, Thrive Global, was originally intended as an extension of her work in these areas, with a focus on improving employee health.
Advertisement
In June, Huffington announced she was working on a new start-up but said her “primary focus” would remain her namesake site.
‘It is important to know when one door closes and another opens and I felt that moment had arrived’.
In 2011, she and other shareholders of the Huffington Post sold it to AOL for about $315 million.
She said she chose to leave the online news organisation, which now operates in 10 languages and has a user base of over 200 million, because she “couldn’t do justice to both companies”. The site won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting in 2013.
The Huffington Post was launched in 2005 as a liberal-leaning news aggregation site.
While the Huffington Post has stayed political throughout the course of its 11 years, its expansion and increasing popularity has seen it branch out into numerous subjects. But she became one of the most powerful women in media and a multi-millionaire in her own right.
Her much-promoted book The Sleep Revolution argues that logging less than seven hours sleep per night is a health hazard, and outlines an elaborate night-time sleep ritual.
Arianna Huffington, pictured at the 2013 Vanity Fair Oscar party, is stepping down as editor-in-chief.
“To everyone at HuffPost: it’s you who make HuffPost what it is”, Huffington tweeted Thursday morning.
Huffington said the new health and wellness company she is launching, Thrive Global, demands her full-time attention. The contract allayed concerns that she would leave the company after Verizon’s $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL, The Huffington Post’s parent company. The sale of Yahoo to Verizon this summer, as the telecommunications giant sought to add digital content capability, cast into relief the questions of the role Huffington would play and the status of Huffington Post as a distinct brand.
Huffington said the company has closed a Series A funding round led by Lerer Hippeau ventures, but did not provide further details on how much money was raised.
Advertisement
In a statement, Tim Armstrong, chief executive officer of AOL, said: “Arianna Huffington is a visionary who built The Huffington Post into a truly transformative news platform”.
