The investment will see NewsCred receive $15 million in Series B funding led by Mayfield Fund, a prominent west coast venture capital firm. The company also revealed on Tuesday that the New York Times, which it has long courted, has signed on as one of its more than 2500 syndication partners.

For anyone unfamiliar, NewsCred uses technology to place a stream of relevant, licensed news content onto the websites of clients like the New York Daily News and Pepsi. NewsCred shares the revenue with its publishing partners.

CEO Shafqat Islam said in a phone interview that the new investment will allow NewsCred to grow its salesforce and expand its presence in non-English speaking markets. The plans follow NewsCred’s recent acquisition of cloud publisher DayLife and its decision to create a human editorial team to complement its algorithm-driven news service.

“Our ambitions are global,” he said. “Our ultimate ambition is to license and curate the world’s top publications.”

Islam said that licensing to brand clients, which also include Toyota and GE, now make up 50% of NewsCred’s business but that publishers remain the company’s core focus.

In an email statement, a New York Times spokesperson said, “We have our own very successful syndication business, which we are continuing to grow.  This agreement with Newscred is one way we think we might be able to expand opportunities.”

The investors taking part in the new Series B round also include Greycroft Partners whose managing partner, Alan Patricof, is a fixture of the New York media scene. NewsCred has raised $5M in previous rounds of funding from FirstMark Capital, IA Ventures, Floodgate Fund, Lerer Ventures, AOL Ventures and others.

Disclosure: NewsCred is a publishing partner of GigaOM/paidContent

NewsCred has long relied on automated curation tools to find and deliver relevant content to its clients, but now the company is adding something more to its journalism — humans. This morning, the company announced a new service named Editorial Curation that lets NewsCred clients buy hands-on human help for their story collection.

Senior editor, Claire Lambrecht, explained that the new service is composed of eight journalists with newsroom experience at places like the New York Times and Slate. She added that, while NewsCred has used humans to aid its robot curation for a while now, this is the first time humans have been offered as a stand-alone service. The idea here is that clients who buy access to NewsCred’s fire hose of news stories can now have a personal editor who has real-life newsroom judgment — such as what type of story should be at the top of a page and for how long.

She says that NewsCred’s automated “semantics can get the ball to 5-yard line but that [human] curation is the touchdown” for clients that want create a complete content experience. Lambrecht said that some clients are buying the human curation in five hour blocks, while others are paying to use it around the clock. NewsCred would not disclose exactly how much a human editor costs but did say that the price varies depending on how much editorial support a client wants; for instance, a brand might pay more for NewsCred to compile special photo features while another might simply want to pay an editor to ensure negative stories don’t surface (Pepsi, for instance, is probably not keen about reports on the New York mayor’s efforts to ban glutton-sized sodas).

The NewsCred announcement coincides with a shifting perspective on automated news. While some feared that the arrival of robot story writers and editors would phase out journalists, the human touch now appears to be back in fashion. For example, the founder of two popular aggregated news sites, Techmeme and Mediagazer, recently talked about the power of human news judgment and the editorial influence of the New York Times.

To get a better idea of how NewsCred works in practice, here’s an earlier write up of how the New York Daily News used it to create a separate news vertical to target the city’s large South Asian community.

(Image by F.Schmidt via Shutterstock)

Today, NewsCred took a further step toward the media big leagues with the acquisition of Daylife, a cloud service that offers publishing tools like image galleries, polls and timelines.

The deal creates a potent new platform for non-publishing brands to create content. The combined entity will be able, for instance, to offer a car or beer maker the ability to create an elegant news information site filled with timely content from professional news agencies. It also means NewsCred and its hundreds of partner news outlets have an opportunity to tap into Daylife’s client base which includes brands like the History Channel, GE, ESPN and Thomson Reuters.

Financial terms were not disclosed but NewsCred CEO Shafqat Islam said by phone that the acquisition would double the company’s customer and revenue base and that NewsCred would retain all Daylife staff.  He added that Daylife’s partnerships with image owners like Getty was a key part of the deal.

“Images drive websites, they’re what fuels the social web these days,” said Islam, noting that user-generated services like Instagram are typically insufficient for professional publishing.

The acquisition caps a remarkable year for NewsCred, which had to reinvent itself for the third time last November, after failing to find success as a consumer service. Since its relaunch as a digital newswire, the company appears to have hit on a niche — removing the technology and licensing friction between publishers and brands that want their content.

Asked about the future of NewsCred, Islam said further acquisitions or an IPO were far from his mind and that he is focusing instead on building the company. For now, NewsCred will focus on enterprise but Islam said down the road the company may consider offering slices of its portfolio to consumers or small businesses.