We’ve confirmed from multiple sources that San Francisco/Seattle based music service iLike, which has been profitable since 2008, is raising new capital in an unusual transaction designed to push out Ticketmaster, an investor since 2006.
The company has raised a total of $16.5 million from the founders, Scott Banister, Bob Pittman, Vinod Khosla and Ticketmaster to date. But their last round of funding was in 2006, where Ticketmaster put the bulk of the capital in via a third round of financing that valued the company at a whopping $53.2 million.
In Q4 2008 Ticketmaster wrote down a number of their venture investments, including a $5.8 million charge for iLike. Internally, they valued that $13.3 million investment at just $7.5 million.
Now, we’ve confirmed, the founding team plus a new investor is offering to buy out all or some of Ticketmaster’s stake in the company. Founders Ali Partovi, Hadi Partovi and Nat Brown, all with significant personal fortunes, will invest part of the new round, with the new investor taking the rest.
The company isn’t commenting on this story.
I like when founders have personal fortunes. It normally means they’re in it for the good of the product/service, rather than making a few extra bucks.
What are you talking about? Like they are not their to make a fortune. Yah they do it from the goodness of their heart.. wake up..smell the Gebadia.. everyone online is here to make money…
Pretty funny, they hounded me for hours awhile ago when I wrote a story associating the two companies closely, saying I was asserting guilt by association. Seems like the relationship was more actively obnoxious than they implied.
iLike is such a boring company
Never excited me, their product is pretty bland and totally unremarkable.
I’m not an expert at these things, but wouldn’t ticketmaster have to want to sell their iLike investment?
Just grab the data from a site like peerelement.com. That’s all iLike is, advertising data. Big whoop.
iLike is simply boring. The experience falls flat on its face. They rode the Facebook wave which has lost momentum and now is just another desperate wannabe music site that really is just a data capture tool for advertising (which they don’t have).
Honestly. What do they know about music anyway? An over technical team of glory hunters who furtrher devalue music rather than add any value at all which the industry desperately needs right now.
meh.
NEXT!