By Sarah E. Needleman

The Wall Street Journal

Entrepreneur Ben Huh has raised more than $32 million in investor capital for his five-year-old media company, Cheezburger Inc., and the business will soon star in a reality show on the Bravo TV network.

Its hit product?

A network of humor websites featuring user-submitted images and goofy captions, such as a photo of a dog playing with yarn and the words, “Testing string theory is sooo exhausting!”

Seattle-based Cheezburger landed at No. 28 on The Wall Street Journal’s annual list of the top 50 U.S. venture-backed companies.

The company, which has roughly a hundred employees, publishes more than 60 humor sites, including FAIL Blog, which highlights random acts of stupidity. The sites receive an average of 15,000 photo and video submissions a day, and while most are published, “the game is to make the home page, and only a few hundred make it,” Mr. Huh says.

Meanwhile, the Cheezburger network last month attracted eight million unique U.S. visitors and ranked third among the most visited humor sites tracked by analytics firm comScore Inc., trailing a collection of sites from rivals Break.com and Cracked.com.

According to Mr. Huh, the company’s founder and chief executive, Cheezburger gets the bulk of its revenue from selling advertising, with the rest coming from licensing deals–the company has attached its name to several books, for example—and sales of merchandise, such as calendars, T-shirts and magnets.

Mr. Huh, who is 34 years old and a native of Korea, started Cheezburger in 2007 when he bought what was already a popular humor site, icanhascheezburger.com. His goal was to use the site as a launch pad for a network of dozens of related sites that the company would acquire or create. Mr. Huh says Memebase, a site dedicated to Internet memes, is an example of an original product that he dreamt up himself.

Before building the company, Mr. Huh worked as a product manager for a software start-up. One day he noticed that icanhascheezburger had a link to his personal blog and that the oddly named site was drawing a hefty amount of traffic. He had been contemplating starting a tech business, so he proposed buying the site from the owner.

Mr. Huh declines to disclose what he ended up paying for icanhascheezburger, but he says he took a big risk by using $10,000 of his savings as a nonrefundable placeholder for the site while he sought investor capital. He had just gotten himself out of $40,000 in credit-card debt resulting from a failed prior attempt to launch a start-up. He says a friend with connections in the Seattle investing community helped him raise $2.25 million from 20 angel investors in less than six weeks.

When pitching investors, Mr. Huh says he encouraged them to ignore the content found on icanhascheezburger.com, because they weren’t its target demographic, and to focus instead on the amount of traffic the site was attracting. Many rejected him, and when the company was featured in a local tech blog after its launch, several anonymous commentators described it as “the worst idea ever,” a response, he says, that “made me want to prove them wrong.”

Since then, Mr. Huh has accumulated an additional $30 million in venture capital for Cheezburger from such firms as Avalon Ventures and Foundry Group LLC. Cheezburger’s strategy of curating and distributing user-generated content on the Web “is a massively disruptive approach to how entertainment currently works in our society,” Brad Feld, one of four managing directors at Foundry Group, said via email. Foundry is also an investor in Zynga Inc., the online gaming company that went public late last year.

When and how the company might pay back its investors isn’t a concern for Mr. Huh. “I tell my investors that’s their problem, not mine,” he says. “My job is to build the best business that I can.”

Deep-pocketed investors aren’t the only people who see something special in Cheezburger. The cable network Bravo will air a reality show—it starts Nov. 7 at 11 p.m, ET/PT—called “LOLwork,” which will follow the company’s employees. The title refers to LOLcats, a section of the icanhascheezburger site that contains photos and videos of cats. (For those unfamiliar with Internet shorthand, LOL stands for Laugh Out Loud.)

Viewers of the show might be surprised to see a quiet workplace that doesn’t have any cats–Mr. Huh is actually allergic to felines–though employees are permitted to bring in any well-behaved pet.

“We’re really, really serious at the office,” says Mr. Huh, referring to his staff members, who work alongside him in an open space without cubicle walls. His wife is also an employee, overseeing the company’s customer-service team. “We have a mission to make the world happy for five minutes a day,” Mr. Huh says.

While the show is likely to raise his profile, Mr. Huh is already a bit of a celebrity. He says strangers have asked to take a picture with him at tech-industry conferences, and recently he was approached by a fan who recognized him while he was shopping at a farmer’s market in Vancouver.

“I try to not let that get to my head,” he says.

Write to Sarah E. Needleman at sarah.needleman@wsj.com