How Axios Turned Its Editorial Formula Into a Software Business

In 2016, Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz left Politico, where VandeHei had been a co-founder, Allen had built the Playbook newsletter, and Schwartz had served as chief revenue officer. They launched Axios in January 2017. Axios articles were designed to be brief, usually running under 300 words, with information organized under recurring labels such as “Why it matters” and “The big picture.” The company called the approach Smart Brevity, trademarked it, and used it across its editorial products.

By August 2022, Axios had produced two separate outcomes. Cox Enterprises acquired the news business in a deal that valued Axios at $525 million. The software arm, Axios HQ, spun off into a standalone company led by Schwartz and raised venture capital on its own. The newsroom went to Cox, while the founders retained majority ownership of the independent software company.

The Format Was the Product From Day One

Most media companies treat house style as an internal convention. Axios treated it as intellectual property. Articles and newsletters followed the same template of a bolded headline, a one-sentence summary, axioms in bold, and bullet points underneath. The consistency trained readers to expect a specific reading experience and advertisers to associate the brand with efficiency.

In 2020, newsletter sponsorships contributed more than half of Axios's total revenue, according to The Wall Street Journal. Mike Allen's morning newsletter Axios AM extended the franchise he had built at Politico with Playbook, and the company built a portfolio of industry newsletters on top of it. The company said in July 2022 that Axios Local newsletters had surpassed 1 million subscribers across 24 markets.

A rigid format is repeatable and teachable, designed to scale through repeatable templates and small editorial teams. New reporters could be trained into it. New city editions could launch on it. And, as it turned out, other companies could buy it.

Corporations Asked to License the Style

The software business began with inbound demand. According to Axios HQ, half a dozen corporations separately called the founders in 2016 asking for help communicating with the clarity and efficiency of the company's newsletter writers. The founders dismissed the requests at first. The calls grew to 20 or more, and the team began studying why so many leaders struggle to communicate effectively. Schwartz has also said that people inside Axios were pressing for the tool as a way to streamline communication between employees.

Axios HQ launched in February 2021 as a software product that let organizations write their own internal updates in the Smart Brevity structure. The tool scored drafts on clarity and length, supplied templates modeled on Axios newsletters, and tracked whether recipients actually read the updates. Software licensing started at $10,000 for an annual contract.

Eight months after launch, HQ had earned over $1 million in software licensing revenue and an additional $2 million from professional services, which provided clients with management training in Smart Brevity. Around 30 clients paid for those services on top of licensing, some at upwards of six figures for an annual contract. The client list of 150 organizations included Delta Air Lines, local governments, and the Austin Independent School District, which used HQ to communicate with parents, students, and staff.

Schwartz described the ambition as building two businesses around the same core idea. Axios would operate a news company alongside a communication software company, following the model Bloomberg established with its newsroom and terminal business.

Retention Proved the Model Before Scale Did

The revenue was small relative to the news business, which was expected to reach about $100 million in 2022. The retention data mattered more. According to Axios HQ, every licensee that signed in the first quarter of 2021 renewed for 2022, and those clients extended their initial one-year deals into two-year contracts. Corporate communications budgets renew annually, and a tool embedded in a company's weekly executive update becomes difficult to remove. The news business sold attention to advertisers month by month, and the software business sold a workflow that compounded.

The founders reinforced the moat in print. In September 2022, Workman published Smart Brevity, The Power of Saying More with Less, written by all three co-founders. The book became a Wall Street Journal and USA Today national bestseller. It served as a manifesto and top-of-funnel marketing for the software, since every reader who adopted the method within a company became a prospect for the platform that enforced it.

The Sale

Cox Enterprises, which had first invested in Axios in fall 2021, agreed to acquire the company in August 2022 at a $525 million valuation. Cox took 70% ownership, with the founders and employees retaining about 30%. The deal included an additional $25 million investment in the media arm to fund expansion across local, national, and subscription products. The New York Times reported the price represented about five times projected 2022 revenue.

Axios HQ was carved out and spun off as a separate, standalone company led by Schwartz, majority-owned by the founders, with Cox as a minority investor. At the time of the sale, Axios had over 500 employees, and nearly 100 of them worked for Axios HQ. The company said HQ planned to more than double in size the following year and triple its revenue. 

The Software Company 

The spinout raised institutional money within months. In March 2023, Axios HQ closed a $20 million Series A at nearly a $100 million post-money valuation, led by Glade Brook Capital Partners and joined by Greycroft, with Cox Enterprises remaining a minority investor. At the time of the raise, the company reported nearly $7 million in annual recurring revenue and over 500 enterprise clients, including Sweetgreen and Edelman. Within the following year, it reported surpassing $10 million in annual recurring revenue and added integrations with Slack and Microsoft Teams.

The product also grew more sophisticated over time. The platform added generative AI features built with OpenAI technology, and Axios HQ says its updates run 40% shorter on average than traditional workplace communications. The company describes itself as the only internal communications platform powered by Smart Brevity and says more than 600 organizations use it. Its first acquisition followed, a deal for Mixing Board that closed in late November 2024 and was announced that December. Mixing Board is a roughly 450-member community of communications and brand leaders founded by Sean Garrett, who joined Axios HQ as chief communications officer. The purchase extended the company beyond software into the professional network.

Where Axios Stands Now

One writing formula now supports three separate revenue engines. It underpins the Axios news business owned by Cox, the enterprise software company still controlled by the founders, and a broader ecosystem of books, training courses, and services that bring customers into the software. A decade after Axios began testing the approach, Smart Brevity now extends far beyond the newsroom. It shapes the journalism, guides internal communications at Delta, Walmart, and more than 600 other organizations, and appears in bestselling books and corporate training programs. VandeHei, Allen, and Schwartz used Axios to prove that the method worked. The newsroom later created a larger commercial opportunity. That system continues to spread through the daily communications of the organizations that use it.

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