Miso Raises $4M From Khosla Ventures, Google, Hearst

Miso said it raised $4 million in a round led by new investor Khosla Ventures and joined by Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media. The startup developing technology around television viewing to date has raised $6M.

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Khosla Invests in Miso to Lead TV 2.0

It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come since January. We announced our Series A round, approached 100K users, announced a partnership with OWN and introduced the Miso API.

Now, we’re excited to announce that we’re bringing on Khosla Ventures as a new investor in Miso as a part of an additional $4M in financing. Khosla Ventures led the round with Google Ventures and Hearst Interactive Media, and to date we have raised $6M.

Khosla Ventures is known for its reputation for building great companies, such as Square and Meebo, and we’re excited to be a part of that same roster. We’re grateful for the rare opportunity to learn from Vinod Khosla, one of the greatest investors, product thinkers, team builders and entrepreneur over the last few decades.

“People are changing the way they watch television. They are also on their phones and tablets, and this creates new opportunities for innovation in the second screen space. We feel that Miso is leading the way.”    –Vinod Khosla

For the next year, we’re confident that with his leadership and working with the Khosla team we’ll grow our unique community of a quarter-million strong to tens of millions and much more.

Here’s a quick look back at the past year:

•    We’ve continued to focus on deeper engagement and experiences that make TV watching better. We launched an app gallery, ratings, a chatter stream, and a user generated platform for people to create questions for each other.

•    We’ve collaborated and innovated with key TV partners to deliver a true connected second screen experience. With partnerships from DIRECTV and AT&T U-Verse, our app communicates with the TV receiver to let you know what’s on your TV and where you are in the show. This makes the second screen experience more seamless and natural.

•    We’ve provided a more extended experience to enrich TV. We’ve always believed a synchronized experience with your mobile devices and TV is a key part of Miso …and now it’s here. With Showtime’s Dexter as our first launch partner, now you can get interesting tidbits, facts, quotes, and more when you watch your show.

Quite a year for a team of twelve so far, and this doesn’t even cover the ability to synchronize Miso with the TV via audio, delivering social TV solutions on the TV, partnering with Facebook to make TV sharing even easier, and much more.

But we’re just scratching the surface. Stay tuned – we have a lot of new developments with the platform, partners and more coming. And we can’t wait to share them with you!

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