JAFCO joins Benchmark and Redpoint as backers to help the site organize TV content online.
Clicker, a service that lets users to browse through TV content on the web, has raised an $11 million Series B round, bringing its total funding to $19 million. The round was led by JAFCO Ventures, with existing investors Benchmark Capital and Redpoint Ventures also participating. JAFCO’s Joe Horowitz will join the Clicker board, where Bill Gurley, Geoff Yang and Blake Krikorian, founder of Sling Media, also hold seats.
Clicker launched in September of last year and opened to the public in November, with the aim of becoming the ultimate guide to Internet television. Based on the premise that broadcast-quality videos are abundant but poorly organized online—thousands of episodes are housed on thousands of different sites—Clicker culls all the TV-quality video content from around the web and delivers it in one organized experience with a pretty user interface.
The company has the advantage that it doesn’t need to host any video—a big cost that has been partly responsible for
the demise of many online video startups. Rather, the site helps users find the episodes they’re interested in, and then sends them over to content hosting destinations like Hulu, ABC.com or Collegehumor to view the videos.
The company plans to use the new funds to support the long-term product development and partnerships with major consumer electronics, connectivity and content providers. It has done well on the buzz meter, being named one of OnMedia’s Top 100 Private Companies, Mashable’s 8 Companies Reinventing Television Online, and ReadWriteWeb’s 10 Start-up Products of 2009.
Clicker’s index includes about 600,000 episodes from 10,000 shows, as well as movies from Netflix and Amazon Video on Demand. Educational content from 22 universities also appears in the site’s college section.
The company raised it’s first $8 million round in October of 2008, well before it’s debut at TC50 in Septemeber of 2009.
Steven Loeb
