• VentureBeat, Tuesday, March 1, 2011 11:49 AM

Streaming video service Boxee just closed a new round of funding worth $16.5 million. Pitango and Softbank led the round, along with existing investors General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures. Boxee has now raised a total of $26.5 million in funding. In 2009, VentureBeat's Anthony Ha says he "wondered if Boxee was a little ahead of its time, and if the demand for Web content on TVs just wasn't there yet."

Boxee founder and CEO Avner Ronen told him that a generation gap was developing, with younger viewers seeing the Internet as the center of their entertainment. Concedes Ha: "That seems to have been borne out in the last year." Boxee plans to use the new funding to grow its product development team, add more content, and sign up more partners to create Boxee devices. Presently, the company claims about 1.6 million users.

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