Boxfish, one of a growing number of startups that’s focused on helping consumers find something interesting to watch on TV, confirmed that it has landed a $7 million “B” round led by Atlantic Bridge, plus help from Samsung and existing investors T-Ventures and Naya Ventures.
The new round takes Boxfish’s total funding beyond the $10 million mark. Company co-founder Eoin Dowling told TechCrunch that Boxfish will use the funds to boost headcount and target new markets, noting that Boxfish recently opened an office in Dublin.
As Dowling explained to Multichannel News last year, Boxfish is attempting to set itself apart by generating recommendations by tracking, capturing, and indexing the spoken words of hundreds of channels in real-time, on a show-by-show or movie-by-movie basis.
Under this approach, which catalogs those spoken words and a video thumbnail taken every 10 seconds in the Amazon cloud, Boxfish aims to index TV much like Google indexes the Web, while also picking up on what’s trending in areas such as news, sports, and celebrity gossip and giving users a more targeted view of what might be of interest to them.
Boxfish’s ambitions include integrations with MSO-supplied set-tops and other devices such as smart TV. Last year, it launched an API focused on the TV industry, aiming to complement what it already has cooking on its “Live Guide” apps for iOS and Android-based devices. At the time, the company said DirecTV, Dish Network, AT&T, TiVo and Google were among the companies using Boxfish data for features that have either been launched or were in development.
Boxfish is one of several companies focused on video recommendations, including ThinkAnalytics, Jinni and Digitalsmiths, which was recently acquired by TiVo.
