Boxee has announced it closed a $16.5 million (€11.6 million) round of financing, bringing new investors Pitango and Softbank on board. These are in addition to participation by prior investors General Catalyst, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Isaac Hillel from Pitango will join the Boxee board.
Boxee’s previous round of financing was $6 million and at that time there were 12 employees, the software in alpha and the Boxee Box a dream. “Fast forward 18 months and we are a different company. 34 employees, version 1.0 of the software and the Boxee Box is available in more than 30 countries,” according to the Boxee blog.
With the new funding in place Boxee said it will be focusing on three main things: Product – “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 to do list in the US and internationally. We realise 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.”
