Roku Raises More Menlo Money

Written by Ryan Lawler

Friday, August 7. 2009 at 05:25 PM EDT Post a comment

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Broadband set-top box manufacturer Roku Inc. looks to have raised an additional $13.4 million in new funds from Menlo Ventures over two rounds of financing.

According to documents filed with the SEC, Roku closed out the Series C financing round that it first announced last fall with an additional $5 million investment from Menlo, bringing the total amount raised in that round to $10 million.

In addition to closing out its Series C round, the company also appears to have raised a further investment of $8.4 million from Menlo.

Brian Jaquet, director of corporate communications at Roku, declined to comment on the financing, except to confirm that Menlo Ventures is an investor in the company, along with Netflix and Roku founder Anthony Wood.

Netflix is a minority investor in the company, having contributed to a $6 million Series B round of financing that Roku raised in February 2008.

The additional funding comes as Roku is ramping up the amount of content it serves on its broadband set-top box. While the Roku player initially launched exclusively with video from Netflix's "Watch Instantly" streaming service, it has recently added content from Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)'s Video On Demand and online video distributor Blip.tv

The amount of content that will find its way on the Roku Player is expected to grow even further, as the company released a software development kit (SDK) that will allow distributors of online video to build their own video channels for viewing on the set-top box.