Scribd’s Bet on Human Knowledge Is Paying Off

With clearer focus and tighter execution, the company is proving that subscriptions built on depth, not just speed, still have a future.

BY JENNIFER CONRAD, SENIOR WRITER @JENNIFERCONRAD

Tony Grimminck, Scribd CEO. Illustration: Inc.; Photos: Courtesy company

On paper, Scribd shouldn’t work in 2026. It’s a paid subscription for a massive grab bag of e‑books, PDFs, and documents, at a time when people are used to pulling answers, excerpts, or explanations instantly without committing to another monthly bill. 

Yet, since Tony Grimminck took over as CEO role October 2023, usage has increased 50 percent, and the company went from breaking even to margins of 20 percent over EBITDA. 

Grimminck, who had been the CFO and took over from co-founder and longtime CEO Trip Adler, saw his mission as twofold: First, he needed to make the company profitable. At the same time, he needed to figure out how the company could thrive just as chatbots based on large language models began changing how people searched for and accessed information online.  

“In some ways this existential threat of, ‘holy shit, we could be replaced by an LLM, what’s our purpose?’ really spurred us to evolve the product,” he says. “We need to understand why our customers are coming to us and how we can best serve them.” 

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When San Francisco–based Scribd launched in 2007, Adler and co-founder Jared Friedman (who left in 2015) described the company as a “YouTube for documents.” Fresh out of one of the first classes of Y Combinator, they wanted to create a platform for people to seamlessly publish documents online, and for people who were searching for information on a particular topic to find it. In 2013, it introduced a monthly subscription model and began licensing content from major publishers, just as ebooks were taking off.  

By 2023, Scribd, which has raised nearly $75 million to date—most recently a $25 million Series E round in 2019, according to PitchBook—had millions of pieces of content and millions of visitors finding its documents through search. But it had evolved into what Grimminck calls a “hairball of content,” that could be challenging to search, including documents, presentations, ebooks, audiobooks, sheet music, and podcasts. 

“Different people came for different reasons, and it was difficult to meet our customer expectations as a single destination,” he says. Over the past few years, the company split into four lines of business. 

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