Boxee has closed a $16.5M round of financing featuring new investors Pitango and Softbank, with participation by prior investors General Catalyst, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures.
The company will use the funds for a number of purposes. It will allow the company to hire more developers. A challenge the company has, CEO Avner Ronen said, is 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,” he said, and then provided a hint about those ideas. “Many of you would like to see Boxee handle all the video on their TV with no need to switch inputs,” he said. “We’d like to get there, too.”
Ronen noted that Boxee recently added Netflix and Vudu to the Boxee Box and vowed to pursue more content deals.
More devices based on Boxee are coming, he said. D-Link is shipping the Boxee Box, while 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,” Ronen concluded.
The company raised $6 million during its first round of funding.