Semafor’s Really, Really Excited About DC Event; Sees 4x Revenue Growth

Semafor is really, really excited about its upcoming World Economy Summit. With apparent good reason. Revenue’s set to quadruple from last year’s event, attendees more than double to 5,000 from 2,000 to watch 200 bigwig CEOs pow wow in what Semafor calls “the largest gathering of CEOs on U.S. soil this year,” but it’s certainly not alone in its desire to gather the top of the C-suite.

The Wall Street Journal, Axios, Harvard Business Review and more are all targeting chief executive officers is one way, shape or form, be it as speakers at conferences or attendees at exclusive, invitation-only events (See: Semafor’s own ‘The CEO Signal,’ the world’s most exclusive membership for global business leaders).

This will be Semafor’s third such event, held over three days in April in Washington, DC. Semafor itself was founded in 2022. There will be a dozen main stages focused on themes like global finance, banking and markets, artificial intelligence and energy. Attendees must apply to attend (no entrance fee) so there is some curation as to who gets in, with a focus on private sector leaders, policymakers and media.

“It’s a testament to the fact that really, really big things can be accomplished by really young organizations through creativity and experience and just ambition,” Rachel Oppenheim, chief revenue officer at Semafor, told AMO.

The success of the grouping comes as Semafor identified a “white space” during a time when the IMF and World Bank typically holds meetings. It’s pretty good timing as U.S. President Donald Trump rattles the world on a daily basis with ideas that ping pong and force executives to be glued to the page, the screen or audio.

“Given Washington’s extraordinarily ascendant role on the global business and policy stage, it just has come together, and certainly succeeded beyond our hopes,” Oppenheim said. “Semafor obviously has made extraordinary investments in DC. Our audiences have grown really, really robustly, and we’ve now grown to a place where we’re reaching just about all of official Washington.”

Oppenheim said some people have begun referring to the event as the Davos on the Potomac, and though it doesn’t boast the same political heavyweights, it does have the heads of Netflix, Mastercard, Chevron and Land O’Lakes (ie, the butter people).

The Journalism

Semafor has 800,000 subscribers across its newsletter portfolio with a focus on reaching the highest level decision makers across the public and private sectors. About 70% of readership is in the U.S. and 30% abroad. Semafor kicked off international coverage with an Africa edition early on, and added a Gulf division in September. Other regions will be added in the future, Oppenheim said.

But for the purposes of this event, what matters is U.S. political coverage.

“We’re really, really focused on bipartisan journalism, and have earned really, really deep appreciation from across Washington,” Oppenheim said. Ad Fontes Media puts bias at Semafor in the middle. Media Bias/Fact Check calls it least biased, where AllSides rates it as leaning left.

Oppenheim said that CEOs and c-suite executives have been a big area of editorial focus and priority.

“The nexus of business economics, policy and technology have made us uniquely able to convene an event in this particular territory,” Oppenheim said. She cited “empathy and value [that] sit at the heart of what has made us successful; so many of our conversations internally, and how we’re thinking about product development and platform development, has to do with having just immense empathy for the crosswinds that these C-suite executives live in every single day; how their information and insight needs are different, higher, than most readers.”

Events play a major role for the company and that shows in its evolution:  Semafor’s first full year of revenue saw 30% coming from events. That should reach 50% this year, with the rest from media.

“We are certainly an events-first media company,” Oppenheim said. “Our focus is really, really on building a stakeholder intelligence and stakeholder marketing platform, at least on the commercial sector and how to engage with our partners, and given the incredibly high level audiences across the public and private sector that we focus on supporting and engaging events and live convenings are just like the go to opportunity for us to do that.”

Oppenheim sees the World Economy Summit in 2026 growing at the same pace as 2025 has versus 2024.

“We’ve just demonstrated pretty radical growth patterns with this particular project, and we expect that that would continue,” she said.