Meerkat, the new broadcasting app, sure has some big guns gunning for them- they’ve confirmed a fresh Series B round (the first one was in January), amounting to a staggering $12 million.
Greylock Partners are leading the funding with anywhere between $9 million and $10 million. Other backers including the Universal Music Group, Broadway Video Ventures- the venture side of SNL’s executive producer Lorne Michael’s company, 30 Seconds to mars frontman Jared Leto, Ashton Kutcher, Youtube founder Chad Hurley among others.
The amount invested by the parties is not mentioned, but it is estimated that the final valuation may turn out to be around $52 million.
This announcement comes on the exact same day as Twitter launched a rival streaming service, Periscope. Periscope, which competes directly with Meerkat, lets you live stream videos to your twitter followers. Similar to Meerkat, Twitter’s latest acquisition also allows users to live stream anything – from playing games with friends to doing something adventurous.
Meerkat users were previously able to follow everyone they followed on Twitter, but that stopped since Twitter cut off Meerkat from its social graph.
Meerkat happens to be heavily reliant on Twitter for its distribution, as Meerkat users can stream live video on their smartphones and send a tweet to their followers. Meerkat was a hot commodity at the South by Southwest festival, and analysts say it has been leaping up the popularity ladder in the iOS apps, going from 500 to number 22 in the social category.
It has celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and Snoop Dogg along with a whopping 300k users using the app, 2/3rds of which are iOS users.
