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January 21, 2008
European Angel Money Finds gBox
St. Gallen, Switzerland-based b-to-v sent us the news today that its investor circle is backing an early investment in Cupertino-based gBox, a digital music shopping enabler. The startup developed a widget that can be placed on blogs, personal websites, and socnet homepages (it lists myspace, friendster, and facebook on its website) to show your personal MP3 file wishlist.
The same widget enables members to buy music tracks listed on the wishlists for friends and family as gifts. (See TechCrunch review of gBox for more).
The plan is to add other types of gifts to the catalogue and to make some inroads into the European market, according to the announcement. It also said that it provides a revenue source for social media companies, so it must be able to support revenue sharing.
We don't normally cover US VC deals on this page but the news that gBox has a Euro connection throught its founders and now its investors. gBox is a spinoff of ecommerce service provider Navio, a Calif. based started led by former Brokat co-founder Stefan Roever.
The Brokat connection is what we assume enabled gBox to tap b-to-v for seed financing.
The deal was led by b-to-v member Michael Jansen, a co-founder of Brokat AG. He was CFO from 1994 until 2001, responsible for the arrangement of several venture capital transactions and the firms stellar IPOs (Neuer Markt and NASDAQ) and at one point it had a $6B mkt cap and $250M in sales, according to Roeever.
The company failed to weather the downturn and Jansen led the restructuring in 2001. On his b-to-v profile it says: "He restructured the company from 1,400 people to zero, by selling basically all assets to domestic and international investors." (See Members – About b-to-v )
Posted on January 21, 2008 10:19 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Permalink
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