Stage Two's blog

Coming out of CES this year, Boxee gained a lot of momentum. During the first half of the year we targeted mainstream business press to raise Boxee’s profile for content partners. Articles in the New York Times, The Washington Post, All Things D, and more drove interest from hardware makers, content partners, and even more press. That coverage subsequently also generated attention from the investment community even though Boxee had just raised their Series A in November of last year…

From that interest, we’re happy to announce Boxee has raised their next round of funding. Here’s the news from their blog:

We are happy to announce that Boxee closed a $6M round of financing led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Neil Sequeira from General Catalyst will join our board.

We closed our Series A late last year, but given the momentum and opportunities we’ve seen over the past few months, we thought it made sense to bring in a new partner and additional funds.

General Catalyst brings more than just money to the table. We wanted a partner to help us as we strengthen our relationships with big media and cable companies. As we learned (the hard way), it is a complicated world.. Neil and General Catalyst as a firm have years of experience, deep understanding, and extensive network in these industries, and we are looking forward to working together with them.

Going forward we plan to focus on:

* Improving the product – We are working on the Beta release (due later this fall), but also looking beyond Beta and into the roadmap of 2010. The idea is to have a healthy mix of development driven by user feedback (which is the essence of the upcoming Beta) and innovation that comes from within Boxee.
* Adding more content – We believe Boxee can be a great partner for independent content producers as well as big media companies. We will try to bring more TV Shows, Web Shows and Movies from ad-based, subscription-based and a la carte type services.
* Attracting more developers – While we have an App Store on Boxee, we know it needs some love. For Developers, we know it needs to be easier to develop and monetize apps. For users, we’re going to make it easier to find apps on Boxee. Last but not least we’re going to extend the APIs so everyone can do more with Boxee.
* Bringing Boxee into devices – Boxee today is mostly serving a tech-savvy audience – those who feel comfortable connecting a computer to a TV. To make Boxee more accessible for a mainstream consumer it’s important for us to get Boxee embedded into connected TVs and Blu-Ray players, game consoles and set-top boxes. We’re already talking to device makers to ensure Boxee works on a variety of platforms for 2010.

We are really excited about the future and glad to have General Catalyst and Neil as part of the team.

Here’s the coverage so far:
NYTimes: Bits
TechCrunch/Washington Post
CNet
New York Observer
The Deal
Read Write Web
Digital Media Wire
Light Reading
Broadband TV News
Inquisitr

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 12th, 2009 at 4:29 pm and is filed under Clients. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.