Exfm, the little Chrome extension that could, just closed a round of funding for precisely $1,500,001 from existing investor Spark Capital, VentureBeat reports. The company filed its Form D with the SEC yesterday.
Exfm started in 2010 as a Chrome extension that catalogued addresses of audio files as you browsed; today, it’s available for Safari, Firefox, Android, iPhone, and as an embeddable player, with ambitions for much more. “It was the right amount for the business now- it fuels our growth and lets us control our own destiny,” COO Charles Smith said in an email. “As for the extra $1, I wish I had an explanation that included Jeremy Lin.”
Exfm’s last raise was in April, for $750,000, prompting this blog to call dub it “delightful product with dubious business model.” Exfm is building a music discovery platform somewhere at the nexus of Hype Machine, Pandora Last.fm and Soundcloud, encouraging users to find and share music there. Exfm will bill itself as a platform for bloggers who want to be tastemakers, small and medium bands who want to reach new audiences, and artists and labels who want rich data about their fanbases, Mr. Smith told Betabeat at the time.
Exfm’s clever trick was launching first as a browser extension, effectively converting its users into scouts for music files. The extension scans each page for audio, then adds the address of the file to its library. In this way Exfm was able to build up a cache of music fairly rapidly.
But with so many new offerings, we wondered which was meant to be the flagship. “Exfm is our main product,” Mr. Smith clarified. “Head there and push play on all types of great music.”
VentureBeat reports the service has 300,000 active users. Exfm has raised a total of $2.75 million and is up to seven employees with an office in Soho.
