Boxee Lands $16.5M in Recent Round of Financing
The company who brought us the Boxee Box last year has entered a new round of funding and managed to come out with a pretty penny. After taking months to move through beta and other developmental hurdles, the Box has come through with some extremely positive developments.
The announcement of their gains comes from Boxee themselves,
We are happy to announce that Boxee has closed a $16.5M round of financing featuring new investors Pitango and Softbank, with participation by prior investors General Catalyst, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Isaac Hillel from Pitango will join our board.
Our previous round of financing was $6M and at that time we were 12 employees, our software was in alpha and the Boxee Box was a dream. Fast forward 18 months and we are a different company. 34 employees, ver 1.0 of the software and the Boxee Box is available in more than 30 countries.
It took them from December 2009 until August 2010 to get a pre-order box prepared running Intel Atom and also proudly crowing HTML 5 support. Since then the company has been relatively quiet, but they haven’t been missed in the background of the market being fought over between other DVRs and set-top-boxes like TiVo, Roku, and even devices such as the Wii, PS3, and Xbox.
As we’ve seen, both video game consoles and other set-top-boxes are becoming the new entertainment PC framework of the Internet TV age, supporting apps and delivery mechanisms like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime. In fact, part of Boxee’s finance announcement involves the inclusion of Netflix into their stable of media distribution.
Boxee announces that they intend to expand their development team with the new funding, develop relationships with partners, and use that to deepen their ability to produce an excellent product.
They also posted that they intend to allow consumers to use Boxee as their central entertainment center and run all their inputs through it rather than just their Internet TV.
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