HackerNoon


HackerNoon is a community-driven online publishing platform based in Edwards, Colorado. Founded in 2016 by David Smooke, it operates an open library of user-submitted articles covering software development, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.

History

HackerNoon was founded in January 2016 by David Smooke as a Medium-based blog titled Hacker Daily before rebranding to its current name.
Later, HackerNoon chose to build its own publishing infrastructure. In early 2019, HackerNoon raised US$1.07 million from about 1,200 backers through a Regulation Crowdfunding campaign on StartEngine. The funding supported development of a proprietary content management system, and HackerNoon 2.0 launched in July 2019 with support from a US$100,000 Google cloud-hosting grant. In 2020, HackerNoon received a US$1 million investment from micropayments firm Coil at a pre-money valuation of US$11.5 million. In 2023, it raised an additional US$250,000 led by Forward Research at an estimated valuation of US$50 million.

Platform

HackerNoon operates on a community-driven model, publishing work from more than 50,000 contributing writers rather than maintaining a large full-time staff. As of 2025, the platform reported reviewing over 5,000 submissions per month. Its editorial process combines human review with automated tools, including a 2025 partnership with GPTZero to identify AI-generated content.
HackerNoon runs on a proprietary technology stack built with Next.js and Google Firebase. it is designed to avoid pop-ups and provide analytics dashboards for contributors. It also adopted decentralized storage protocols to archive its published articles.
HackerNoon covers a range of topics including software development, startups, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, and hacker culture. It serves as a platform for industry professionals and tech enthusiasts to publish technical articles, insights, and opinion pieces. The platform does not use paywalls and generates revenue primarily through sponsorships and native brand partnerships. Writers retain copyright to their work under a non-exclusive license.