Boxee Secures $16.5M in Funding
Boxee, maker of the Boxee Box set-top device, has just closed a $16.5 million round of financing. The company has pulled in two new investors with this round-Pitango, out of Tel Aviv, and Softbank, out of New York City-and has garnered additional investments from General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures. Pitango's managing general partner Isaac Hillel will join Boxee's board of directors.
Boxee has big plans for the additional funds. It will grow its development team so that it can add new features to the Boxee platform and improve functionality. It also plans to increase entertainment options and improve program discovery. Boxee's execs would like Boxee to handle all the video on a television, so the viewer has no need to switch inputs.
The company would like to work with more hardware partners to create more Boxee devices. Currently, D-Link is producing the Boxee Box, while Iomega is working on a Boxee NAS device and ViewSonic is creating a TV that integrates the Boxee platform. Boxee would like to use this funding to fuel new partnerships.
Boxee notes that it's previous $6 million round of funding came in August, 2009, when the company had just 12 employees and the software was in alpha. Since that time, Boxee has made its 1.0 software available in over 30 countries, and the company has 34 employees.
"We are really excited to welcome our new investors and thankful for the continued support of our existing investors. Most of all we're happy that we get to continue to improve Boxee for our users," says Andrew Kippen, Boxee's vice president of marketing.
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