Audiophilic startup SoundCloud raises a reported $50M. SoundCloud, a startup focusing on audio-sharing in social media, has announced a new (and reportedly sizable) round of funding.
The round, which was led by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, may have been as large as $50 million, TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher reports. A SoundCloud rep confirmed all the details except the amount in an email exchange with VentureBeat this afternoon. Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker will join the SoundCloud board. GGV Capital also participated in the round, which the startup hopes to use to aid in more rapid expansion. SoundCloud’s service was first focused toward professional musicians who needed better options for sharing music online. “SoundCloud has seen exponential growth this year in terms of users and greatly evolved our product offerings,” said SoundCloud founder and CEO Alexander Ljung in a blog post today. SoundCloud was founded in late 2008 and has taken two previous rounds of funding totaling roughy $16 million. SoundCloud: On Startup Culture, Entrepreneurial Employees & Hackdays.
YouTube owned video; Facebook, our social interactions; Instagram, our photos; Twitter, our quick thoughts; and Google, our burning questions.
Yet, there was something missing, something so simple it seemed crazy no one thought of it before. A place devoted entirely to high-quality sound. Was it even necessary? SoundCloud, a social sound platform has proven, emphatically, yes. With a beautiful user experience, including sound visualizations that allow people to comment on a single note, SoundCloud has rapidly grown to host over 15 million users, creating and promoting their sounds online. At the helm is Co-Founder and CTO Eric Wahlforss, who oversees product strategy with a well-curated team of architects and engineers at the center of Berlin’s burgeoning startup scene. With a new, more social Next SoundCloud release due in the near future, I thought it was the perfect time to sit down with Wahlforss for a chat about how to build an awesome (and empowered) startup culture.
Of course. Saul Klein’s List Of Europe’s Next Billion-Dollar Tech Companies. Five European Startups To Watch. Editor’s note: Guest contributor Amit Shafrir is president of Badoo, a social network for meeting new people based in London with 130 million users.
Silicon Valley is famously, and rightly, proud of its place as the spiritual home for startups. And it has an inspiring and awesome track record that’s tough to beat. However, as the recent Le Web conference proved, European tech hubs like London, Berlin and more recently Paris, can now also lay claim to breeding world-class entrepreneurs. There’s a sense that Europe is finally getting its groove on when it comes to startup innovation, and that’s exciting to watch and be a part of.
(When even Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld is getting in on the action, you know that Digital/Tech is having a moment…) Loic Le Meur’s mission for Le Web—to bring the best of Silicon Valley to Europe—is a laudable one. But hang on a second. With Spotify as a notable exception, there wasn’t a ton of excitement or buzz about those European startups over here.
Mozilla And SoundCloud In Berlin Startup Hub. Why Soundcloud Is The Most Interesting Startup In The World, And Why 2012 Is The Year of Music Startups. Yesterday, Techcrunch broke the news that Soundcloud had raised a new Series B round of $50m dollars, led by Kleiner Perkins, at something like a $200m valuation.
This is an awesome bet for KPCB, because Soundcloud is the most interesting startup in the world, and further suggests that 2012 is the year of the music startup. As I was writing my top ten trends to shape VC in 2012 post, one of the predictions that just missed the list was that in 2012, music startups will achieve platform levels that allows for a totally different level of dynamism and robustness in the startup ecosystem. This platform-ization will come across every part of the music experience: Access to major label tracks: Spotify’s big announcement from a few weeks back was the opening of their platform API to allow 3rd party developers to build apps on top of their repository of tracks.