How Semafor turned Washington into a profit center

• Semafor, the high-profile news startup founded in 2022, says it's now profitable — a rarity for a new media company.
• It's one of several startups that have focused on Washington, DC, where business and politics are increasingly fusing.
• Semafor CEO Justin Smith says his company hopes to build a DC version of Davos, the Swiss-based global business conference.

The news business is gloomy these days, and lots of companies are bracing for more grim news: Changes in the distribution landscape are making it harder to get the news you produce in front of people who want to consume it, which means you have less revenue to make more compelling news. Which can lead to a grim cycle.

But last week, Semafor, which pitches itself as a news outlet for the global leadership class, said it was bucking the trend: The startup, launched by former BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith and former Bloomberg executive Justin Smith in 2022, had turned a profit in 2025.

The speed at which Semafor has made this work is surprising. The business plan is less so: Semafor, like other recent successful news startups, has built itself by aiming squarely at Washington, DC, and positioning itself as a way for advertisers to reach powerful CEOs and government officials who do business there.

I talked to Semafor CEO Justin Smith (he's not related to Ben Smith) about why the Washington market is lucrative and how his company thinks it can make more money in the future. You can listen to our entire conversation on my Channels podcast; what follows are edited excerpts from our chat.

Peter Kafka: You folks just announced that you were profitable last year, your third year in operation. You also announced that you had raised another $30 million, and made a profit of $2 million on $40 million in revenue. If you're making money, why did you raise more money?

Justin Smith: If you've been in the media business for 30 years, you know the media business is pretty unpredictable. Just because you've had a good couple of years, and you've developed what we think is a really interesting model — if there's a chance to raise money, with good long-term investors, to accelerate the things that are working, it's a good idea.

We feel like it's taken three years, but we've got the foundation of what we believe is an interesting innovation in the media space. It's a new formula that is working, and we feel like we can extend it across the world and across new markets, and that's what we're going to use the new capital for.

Semafor has leaned heavily into events since you launched, and you say 50% of your revenue comes from events. But that's a very hard business to scale. How do you think you'll grow?

We did almost a hundred events this year. But a lot of the energy and focus of our event strategy is around some of the bigger convenings that we do. As we go forward, the idea is not necessarily to go from a hundred to 200 to 300 events.

The strategy is much more likely to be to build a series of tentpoles that themselves become larger, more significant, more valuable commercially, more influential editorially. That's how you scale it.

I've seen people talking about your ambition to take on Davos, the annual global business/policy conference happening this month. Is that a real plan?

When we started Semafor, in the original business plan deck, we saw an opportunity to build a leading CEO convening in the United States. We looked at the US market, and we thought, "It's interesting. This is the largest economy in the world, and there is not a dominant leading CEO convening platform."

We thought that was an interesting fact, which presented an opportunity. So from the very beginning, we envisioned building this from scratch. And we identified Washington, DC, as the best location to do this, which was also a little bit of an unusual choice.

DC's historically not been a place where CEOs travel. It's not been historically a center of business, but that of course has been changing across the last five to seven years: The role of geopolitics in the boardroom, the rise of regulation — all these different trends have converged and now CEOs from both the United States and across the world find themselves in Washington three, four, five, 10 times a year. And we were fortunate because we made that bet.

Peter: You've been describing a business that's very DC-based. You are based in DC. It's really striking that some of the most successful media startups of the last few years — you guys, Axios, Punchbowl, Puck, to some extent — are all making money or trying to make money in Washington, by matching advertisers with powerful people. How much bigger can that market get?

It's effectively a B2B marketplace. What's sometimes confusing to people is that many of these news properties, including Semafor, are consumer-facing now — consumer web pages and consumer-focused newsletters. But since the audience that they're appealing to is this segment of this leadership audience, it allows for a much more targeted type of business monetization.

In this case, it's the corporate affairs market, which is largely corporate reputation. There's also a bit of advocacy advertising.

Facebook saying, "We believe healthy regulation is a great idea."

Exactly. This market has existed for a long time, and there was a whole predecessor group of brands before Politico and Axios. You may remember Roll Call, or the Hill, or National Journal. Those were some of the most successful and profitable and commercially viable media businesses around.

Obviously, these new digital disruptors came along and stole the market from those legacy players. But I think what also happened is that the market grew really, really dramatically because the intersection of government and business has become more pronounced and more intense.

I think the stakes have gotten higher and higher and higher for companies operating in the US, and their needs to communicate their corporate brand positions have gotten more urgent.

I had heard early on that you guys were going to make your version of the networks' Sunday shows, which is fueled by that same economy.

Those were some of the most profitable TV shows on television back in the day. They probably still are today.

You guys have not launched your version of a Sunday show. Do you think that's something you'll try?

We actually started with a video investment. We thought, "Let's see if we can produce this opinion leader video." We tried, and were unable to really figure it out, and we ended up killing it within six months or so.

Because as a startup, I think that's probably one of the better decisions we made — just to focus on the stuff that's working, and stop doing the stuff that's not working.