Boxee, the media center software startup, has won a lot of fans with its open approach to streaming content. And as a result it has won some more money, to the tune of a $6 million second round, led by Boston’s General Catalyst Partners. The new money will be used for growth: Both expanding the team and expanding the service’s reach in the market, we’re told.
But why now? After all, Boxee raised its first round of funding just 8 months ago, a $4 million round with Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital investing. “We’ve seen a lot of momentum over the past couple of months. It seemed like it made sense to go ahead [with a new round],” Boxee’s new head of marketing Andrew Kippen tells us.
Kippen, who previously worked with Boxee in his role at Stage Two Consulting, is the first of many hires Boxee hopes to make over the next couple of months, CEO Avner Ronen says. When it closed its Series A round in November, Boxee was just 11 people, the goal is to ramp up to 20 as soon as possible. This includes engineers but also a strong business team to work on getting Boxee into more devices.
At the same time, Boxee is working hard to get the beta version of its software out the door (it’s still currently in Alpha). Back in June, it previewed that release while also unleashing a huge update to its service which finally included support for Windows. With that important support, the service now has over 600,000 users, we’re told.
General Catalyst Partners accounted for $4 million of this second round, with previous investors Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital each throwing in another $1 million as well. On top of the investment, General Catalyst’s Neil Sequeira is also joining Boxee’s board. Also on the board is Union Square’s Fred Wilson and Spark’s Bijan Sabet.
You do love your puns, don’t you Mr MG.
How could he not?!
We need to wait and see as to what they do with that funding…
As a big fan of MythTV, it is difficult to understand why someone would involve a 3rd party in their media. I think there are ~14 open source media distributions, and several have plug-in architectures.
This sounds like a very risky investment considering how a bootstrapped operation could show up and compete very easily. The barrier to entry is simply low, and the prospect of differentiating through customer service and exclusive content deals seems risky (again).
On the other end of the spectrum there is XBox, AppleTV, TiVO and Roku, and their ability to content deals is superior given established sales force and existing relationships.
Good luck?
Add Boxee to your MythTv like I did and you will see the light. Myth does a horrible job of working with internet content (ug, MythStream??). And, if you didn’t know, internet content is where it’s all going.
While I will agree that doing what it sounds like you want to do requires a bit more knowledge, and it is still too complicated for many (i.e. command line tools), the notion that a properly motivated team of 1 or 2 couldn’t change that is reaching. Check out StreamSniff for the content where the URLs are obfuscated.
Good to know about this internet content thing. I’ll be sure to check it out.
The main difference is that Boxee is a media center for human beings while MythTV is for geeks/Unix lovers.
You don’t need a degree to set up Boxee.
The difference between “Mythbuntu” and Boxee is not $10M. That is all I am saying. So, it’s a risky investment.
Congrats Boxee! Raising money in this market isn’t easy, great job
Wow, Boxee is so awesome. Not only for what it currently is, but also for the amazing potential. I hope this is the future.
Congrats to Avner & Boxee team. It is important that companies like Boxee are pushing the boundaries of how we find & consume content in the home. Without companies like Boxee we’ll end up with the same problems in the living room that carriers give us on our mobile devices.
Great to see your funding so we can continue to watch your product evolve.
Boxee has two big advantages: the interface and the social component: they are on the right way.
Apple should at least watch them…(iTunes 9)
Nice Title.
yap awesome Nice
+4 for the title. nicely done MG
Thanks Fred.
Honestly, publishing news on Boxee without any reference to XBMC is baffling at best.
why does it take so much money for boxee to do what so many others have done for free or at most less than 1 million. is the money for paying employees or for buying other things like licensing etc.?
Marketing and support.
I love Boxee, but would love it more if it ran on my PS3, which is hooked up to my plasma tv 24/7. The connecting laptop/pc to TV element to get the 10 foot experience is the biggest obstacle to mainstream adoption.
Make it run on more devices that are already hooked up to TVs and resistance fades away.
Avner, when does this thing move off of the laptop/computer and to gaming console platforms?
I watch Boxee quite closely and it looks to me like the money goes on large incestuous social media ’scene’ events to preach to the converted and quite probably a lot of business class flights between Israel and the US.
Plex have achieved a lot more with precisely $4m less money.
I’m sorry but if you can’t find a way to get Netflix on the AppleTV with an additional $6 million in funding then you need to hire some more people, lawyers, developers. Whatever it takes let’s get some Netflix on AppleTV.
Am I the only one who dislikes the Boxee user experience? Where going to a new video doesn’t stop the currently playing video as it should but rather keeps playing?
Or that it is a resource hog (I assume – as it is deathly slow as a AppleTV hack).
Hopefully that money goes to: better software (better, slimmer, faster UI) and better content deals (bring Hulu back etc).
Boxee is slow on Apple TV. Not much we could do a about it.
The video playback in the background is an issue of fierce debate… we keep going back and forth between pausing it or not. maybe if we make it easier to go back to the content currently playing it will resolve the issue.
I’d also like to see some kind of deals with hardware makers with Boxee pre-installed and ready to go out of the box. Ie, a tiny, lightweight, always-on, inexpensive AppleTV-ish linux box with Boxee pre-installed and TV ready…
But Boxee needs access to better content first I guess…
I’d also like to see some kind of deals with hardware makers with Boxee pre-installed and ready to go out of the box. Ie, a tiny, lightweight, always-on, inexpensive AppleTV-ish linux box with Boxee pre-installed and TV ready…
But Boxee needs access to better content first I guess…
Oops, should have added great post! Waiting on the next post!
Apple vs Linux round 2: Now on your TV
I´d like to see boxee pre-installed on a tv though. Just hit the switch, and internet content is ready to be watched. No fumbling around with boxes and weird connections most people don´t understand, just a simple, slim integration into the tv.