Boxee gets $16.5 Million Injection in 3rd VC Round

Boxee announced on Tuesday that it has raised $16.5 million in its third round of funding, led by new investors Pitango and Softbank with previous backers including General Catalyst Partners, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures also participating. The company says they will use the funds for continued product development, to strike additional content-related deals, and to seek additional device and distribution partners.

According to Christina Warren at Mashable:

Boxee raised $6 million in August 2009. Since then, the company has nearly tripled in size, released the 1.0 version of Boxee and shipped the Boxee Box. As a longtime Boxee user, I've enjoyed seeing the company evolve from its XBMC and Apple TV hacking roots into its own entity.

CEO Avner Ronen wrote at the Boxee Blog:

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.

We are more hungry and driven than ever. Less naive, but dreaming even more ambitious dreams. We are also recruiting, so if you are a Boxee fan and passionate about what we're doing then maybe you can join us in either NY or TLV. Check out our jobs page.

With the new funding in place we will be focusing on 3 main things:

• Product – We are getting lots of love as well as feature requests and bug reports. The new round will enable us to grow our development team, building new functionality while continuing to squash bugs.One of our greatest challenges will be to add more movies, TV shows, and video while at the same time making it easier to discover and watch them. We have ideas on both fronts and are excited to get to work.Many of you would like to see Boxee handle all the video on their TV with no need to switch inputs. We'd like to get there, too.
• More Content – We recently added Netflix and Vudu to the Boxee Box. These are amazing video services. There are many more sources of content on our ToDo list in the US and internationally. We realize that with every new content source we make Boxee more valuable. We will increase the pace.
• More Partners – D-Link is already shipping the Boxee Box, Iomega is working on a Boxee NAS device and ViewSonic is working on a TV based on Boxee. We plan to sign up more device and distribution partners, giving users more options and more ways to get Boxee.

New York-based Boxee's software and Boxee Box set-top are now available in more than 30 countries. blog comments powered by Disqus

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