TuneIn raises $25M from Institutional Venture Partners

Radio app has already surpassed one billion listening hours this year

Popular radio app TuneIn has just passed one mighty impressive milestone, while also more than doubling its total fundraising by raising a $25 million Series C round of funding, the company announced Wednesday.

The round was led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), with participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Google Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. TuneIn previously raised $16 million in funding from General Catalyst Partners, with participation from Jafco Ventures, Google Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, in August 2012. This latest round brings TuneIn's total funding raised to $47 million.

The company says that the money will be used to develop new products, as well as to invest in building out its internal capabilities, including making new senior hires. This announcement comes on the heels of Axel Martinez, former assistant treasurer at Google, being brought in as the compan's new chief financial officer.

TuneIn expects to double in size by next year to 135 employees. Many of the new hires will be engineers, as TuneIn will continue its focus on further developing the platform and creating additional opportunities for its broadcast partners to monetize.

“This investment gives us the capital to accelerate the development of new technologies and support our ongoing expansion,” said John Donham, CEO of TuneIn, in a statement. “We will use this funding to leverage our momentum, with a particular focus on growing ad revenues for our broadcast partners.”

Jules Maltz, General Partner at IVP, will also be joining the board of directors at TuneIn.

The Palo Alto, California-based TuneIn, which was founded in 2002, lets people listen music, sports, talk and news from around the world, wherever they are. It has over 70,000 AM, FM, HD and Internet radio stations and over two million on-demand programs streaming from every continent, available across 200 connected devices.

In addition to the funding news, TuneIn also announced a major milestone: it has surpassed one billion listening hours in the first four months of 2013, with more than 227 million listening sessions in the month of March alone, making it second only to Pandora in the audio streaming space.

The service now has over 40 million monthly active listeners in 230 countries and territories around the world.

So what brought about these impressive figures? Perhaps it had something to do with the release of TuneIn Live back in February, a personalized recommendation service that creates a customized experience for the individual user based on their listening habits and interests.

The service was combined with a new Trending feature that was also launched by TuneIn around the same time.

TuneIn also recently announced a new integration with Google+, enabling a calendar reminder feature for live events, and to remind them when their favorite radio programs are on.

Whatever it was, TuneIn is doing something right and has now solidified its place in the music streaming space.

(Image source: https://blog.tunein.com)