New Partners. New Funding. New Content Studio. New Hires.
We have a lot of exciting things to announce today, so let’s dive in.
First, I’m really excited to share that we’ve received a new round of funding led by a $100M investment from 21st Century Fox (21CF). The investment will fund a new studio jointly owned by FOX Sports and Caffeine called Caffeine Studios that will create exclusive live broadcasts focused on eSports, video game, sports, and entertainment content for the Caffeine platform. We’ll be announcing more specifics on that content soon.
The infusion of funding and the creation of Caffeine Studios is going to be great for our users and broadcasters, allowing them to create exciting content using new features and tools that will not be possible on any other platform in the world.
As part of the deal, Lachlan Murdoch will be joining Ben Horowitz, John Lilly and myself on the board of Caffeine. This is a game changing deal for us. His knowledge and experience in live event and programming will be an invaluable asset to us as we continue to grow and expand our content offerings. We believe that with his incredible vision and creativity, we are many steps closer to achieving our goal of transforming the way people discover, consume and pay for live broadcasting together. I am beyond fired up and so are both of our teams.
Fox’s investment will be supported by additional investments from our original investors, Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock Partners, as well as some other partners. These incredible partners will help us achieve our vision of becoming a new kind of broadcast company that will bring billions of people together around the content they love.
We also have some great content news to share. In addition to the new content created by Caffeine Studios, we’re now working with the live entertainment giant Live Nation. Beginning in Q4 2018, Live Nation will bring weekly live concerts to Caffeine, giving friends a new way to experience their favorite musical acts from anywhere in the world. Michael Rapino, the CEO of Live Nation, has seen many broadcasting platforms and instantly saw Caffeine’s potential to create an entirely new way to experience live concerts with friends. More information on those concerts is coming soon.
To manage all of this amazing growth, we’ve hired two industry veterans: Jen Folse and Michelle Wagner. Jen comes to us from Apple, where she led the Apple TV design team, and will serve as our new Vice President of Product. She’ll be responsible for leading the product experience, roadmap, and product design team. Michelle has joined us from Evernote, and will manage our human resources, IT and infrastructure as Senior Vice President of People and Places. Both of these executives are phenomenal leaders and executors, and we couldn’t be happier to have them on board.
As you can see, there are a lot of exciting changes in the works at Caffeine, but none of these groundbreaking deals and partnerships would have been possible without my team at Caffeine. Their tireless dedication to creating the world’s first social broadcasting platform that brings friends together is what has allowed Caffeine to achieve so much so quickly. This is just the beginning. We can’t wait to share more details with you in the days and months to come.
Which reminds me…if you haven’t experienced Caffeine yet, there’s no better time to dive in. You can check out Caffeine at caffeine.tv today or download our iPhone App. Once you’ve given it a spin, send us your feedback at team@caffeine.tv. The entire team has worked really hard on this and we’re very excited to share it with everyone!
Ben Keighran
CEO at Caffeine
