Thumbplay, the NYC-based mobile content company that raised a $6 million sixth round earlier this year, has added $2 million more to it, according to an SEC filing. This brings the total money pumped into the company to $61 million over the years. Details on who led the round were not released back in March, but current shareholders include Brookside Capital Advisors, Cross Creek Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Redwood Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Meritech Capital Partners. The company, founded in 2004, sells MP3s, ringtones, videos, games and graphics to mobile-phone users under a subscription model that charges $9.99 a month…with the ringtone market, its bread-and-butter, tanking and with the advent of apps economy, its business’s gotta be hurting, or at least changing fast (and it is trying). It probably missed the optimum M&A window by two years; it had hired Morgan Stanley in 2007 to look at opportunities but nothing came out of it.
Update: The company is painting a rosier picture of its business: it says it recently turned profitable — and it is not just due to layoffs and cost-cutting, it says — and is on track for a big consumer launch sometime in October (which it won’t tell me what it is, on the record). It also said that even though ringtone market is what it is, their full track songs for smartphones is doing very well. On Morgan Stanley, the company says that it was a financial advisor for many years, but they have never had a mandate to sell the company nor have they run a process to do so. The firm only made very high level introductions to distribution and content partners, it said.
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