Turntable.fm may or may not have closed a round of funding, but the startup is definitely hot enough to have the rumor mill in overdrive. Co-founder Seth Goldstein has denied the Business Insider report that the company has raised $7.5 million in funding. “We have not closed any new financing,” he told TechCrunch Thursday night.
But there is no doubt the New York-based company is generating a significant amount of interest in the venture capital community. According to various reports, the venture capital firms are seeking to invest include Union Square Ventures, Accel Partners and Kleiner Perkins. TechCrunch even mentioned Sony, along with AOL and Facebook, as one of the interested companies that is “sniffing around” the company.
Turntable.fm already has some funding – through its previous incarnation. The company recently reinvented itself – the term in the startup world is “pivoted” – after starting out as Stickybits, an app that scans barcodes and links to product reviews, videos and even prizes. Stickybits raised $300,000 in seed funding and $1.6 million from First Round Capital, Lower Case Capital and original investors Mitch Kapor and Polaris Venture Partners.
“Stickybits didn’t work, and the company pivoted, so we wound up in Turntable,” First Roun’s Charlie O’Donnell explained to Billboard.biz in an email today. “That’s what you get for betting on a great team.”