Shazam seeks investors to bring its worth to $500m

Shazam seeks to raise $20 million from investors, to bring its overall worth to $500 million.

Since Shazam’s inception in 1999, the company has raised $120 million, with $72 million raised in the last two years through investments by América Móvil – the largest telecommunications company in Latin America – and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

According to Re/code, who broke the story, the boost requested by the media engagement company and discovery app comes after a pitch to TV advertisers last year. The company hired Rich Riley (formerly Yahoo’s EVP of Americas) as CEO last April, after longtime CEO Andrew Fisher moved to Executive Chairman. Riley spearheaded the next stage of growth, which saw Shazam increase its monthly users from 60 million to 88 million and input video identification and data analysis services to give companies and investors access to consumer segment filters based on what users are listening to or viewing.

Now, the 15-year-old London-headquartered company is currently in the stages of revamping its iPhone app with a focus on TV results, music videos and lyrics. Announced this week as “a larger refresh of the app”, Shazam updated its tag result experience (the company made its name by taking pieces of audio, identifying it and pairing it to the correct audio) to request further action from its users, and yesterday unveiled a Worldwide Top 200 Chart, an additional chart to their local weekly reports. The Shazam app, launched in December, now boats a daily user number of 170,000.

Shazam Entertainment boasts 400 million users in 200 countries and adds another ten million users each month.