Tel Aviv startup Stevie announced that it has raised $1.5 million in a Series A funding round for its social media aggregator service that uses the web and mobile to deliver an awesome TV experience. The latest funding brings the total cash the company has raised to $2.1 million. The startup made public that the round was led by Horizons Ventures and also mentioned that a new iPhone app was also being released.
Currently the company uses an iPad app, the internet and a Windows 8 app to deliver a TV-style aggregate of their Twitter and Facebook data. Stevie has a pretty solid background, having made its way through the Microsoft Accelerator program and debuted at the 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York city.
Stevie is trying to make watching Television a much more personalized experience in hopes that it will render TV watching as we know it today obsolete. A user does not watch an entire show with commercials, but instead “views short clips, documentaries, streamed photos and timeline updates.” This is all based on their social circles as defined but their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
Stevie lets its users sign in through Facebook and include other social media that are aggregated to create a multimedia experience that shows videos, images, status updates and headlines. Stevie also has curated channels that are named Top stories, Fresh Picks, and The Comedy Strip.
Stevie co-founder Yael Givon says that the new found cash will be used to add more social media platforms and customization. He adds that, “There’s a lot of customization that we want to do. we got a lot of feedback from users in the last five or six months and we’re going to implement a lot of it around your ability to choose content and channels.”
The latest iPhone app is free and the company plans to add Android and Xbox by early 2013. Givon also talked about the future of the firm and stated that, “Mobile platforms and connected TV is the direction that we’re aligned for.”
Since the iPhone and iPad apps are free, the company is looking at other methods to monetize its product. The social TV platform is looking at building in advertiser videos into the users stream or a revenue sharing model that has premium content.
Source: BetaKit
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