Author: Raises

Thursday, 23 June 2011

Virtualization And Cloud Security Startup Bromium Raises $9.2M From Andreessen Horowitz And Others

In March we wrote about new Andreessen Horowitz partner Peter Levine’s first investment for the fund in Bromium, a stealthy startup that was at the intersection of “security and virtualization.” Today Bromium is formally announcing the funding and merging from stealth with more details about its business.

The virtualization and cloud security company has closed a $9.2 million series A round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Founded by Gaurav Banga, Simon Crosby and Ian Pratt, Bromium is focused on the delivery of infrastructure products that allow enterprises to safely adopt consumerization and cloud computing.

Bromium says that now more than ever enterprise data faces security risks with the growth of new devices and application access as well as the increasing mobility within businesses. But cloud computing also leaves enterprise data and applications vulnerable to attack. Bromium’s technology promises to bring a more trustworthy computing infrastructure to enterprises who want to move to the cloud.

And Bromium’s founders combined have a considerable amount of experience in virualization and the cloud. Banga was previously CTO and SVP, Engineering at Phoenix Technologies. Crosby was formerly Citrix’s CTO of the Data Center and Cloud Division. And Pratt was the vice president of advanced products in the Virtualization and Management Division at Citrix.

Bromium says that its product will debut in the second half of 2011.

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Shazam Raises A Huge Round To The Tune of $32 Million

Shazam, the application that lets you identify nearly any piece of recorded music by holding your smartphone within earshot of a speaker, is swinging for the fences: the company has just raised a new $32 million funding round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Institutional Venture Partners, with participation from DN Capital.

Shazam surged to popularity on the iPhone and is now also available on Android, Java, BlackBerry, Windows, and Symbian, and has been used by nearly 150 million people since the application launched. And its growth isn’t showing any signs of waning: the company says that it’s seen weekly installs double over the course of the last year, and that users are now tagging four million songs per day.

But music is only the beginning for the company — next, they’re taking on television.

Through a program aptly titled Shazam for TV, the company is working with select partners including MTV, NBCUniversal, and various advertisers to integrate Shazam with their content. TV shows are prompting users to ‘Shazam’ a certain segment by firing up the app and holding it up toward screen, and ads are beginning to do the same (see the video below for some demos).

Once the app recognizes what the viewer is watching, it can present them with any number of things: information about the scene they’re watching, special deals, and other related content. Shazam isn’t the only one using this kind of technology, though — a startup called Intonow also does something similar, and just twelve weeks after it launched, Yahoo acquired the company.

Given the traction Shazam for TV has gotten already it seems like content providers are happy with the results (after all, it isn’t trivial for them to actually embed the ‘Shazam this!’ prompt during a show). I’m curious to see if it lasts: there’s obviously a novelty factor at play, and eventually users are going to expect compelling content each time they ‘Shazam’ a show or commercial. If they’re just getting ads, they’ll probably stop doing it.