Sonos, the Santa Barbara, California based startup that develops of wireless multi-room music systems, is taking a new round of financing from London-based Index Ventures, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Partner Mike Volpi, a forcer Cisco exec who found himself in the middle of a huge drama last year around eBay’s Skype spinoff, will join the board of directors of Sonos.
Volpi will bring real expertise to the Sonos board. As recently as 2007 he ran an $11 billion routing and access products busines for Cisco. He clearly knows how to sell products at scale.
Sonos has been around since 2003 and has raised some $40 million from private angel investors and BV Capital. Until last year the company sold very high end music products that users loved passionately, but the mutli-thousand dollar price point for a complete system made mainstream penetration difficult.
But in 2009 Sonos began selling a new product, the S5 music system, that users control via their iPhone. The S5 is just $400 and has driven “massive growth” says the company.
Like Flip last year, Sonos likely had a choice between selling now or raising new money for major expansion. Flip sold to Cisco. Sonos, it seems, is taking more money, but adding an ex-Cisco exec as well. Perhaps they’ll get their cake and eat it, too.
Sonos wouldn’t comment on this story. But we believe the deal will close and be announced in the next week or two.
Sonos is a developer of wireless multi-room music systems for the home. The Sonos Multi-Room Music System is the first, wireless multi-room music system that lets you play all the music you want all over your house — and control it all from the palm of your hand. Sonos liberates the music stored on a computer so it can be enjoyed all over the house. In addition, by partnering with audio services like Audible.com, Last.fm, Napster, Pandora, RadioTime, Rhapsody, SIRIUS...
Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm specializing in investments in information technology and life sciences companies. The firm invests in seed, early and growth stage start-ups across US and Europe. Since its inception in 1996, Index Ventures has backed visionary entrepreneurs who have taken on incumbents and built seminal companies in a number of growth sectors including: open source software companies such as MySQL, Trolltech, Zend and Pentaho; broadband and VOIP companies such as Virata, Skype, FON and...
Mike Volpi joined Index Ventures in July 2009. He is a Partner in the San Francisco office, focusing on investments in the Enterprise Software and Consumer Internet companies. He also contributes to the firm’s later stage growth fund and he currently serves on the boards of Path, Sonos, Lookout, Hortonworks, Soundcloud, Big Switch Networks, Zuora, Foodily, and Storsimple. Mike is also on the board of Ericsson (NASDAQ: ERIC). Mike was previously a Director of Cloud.com (now part of Citrix). Mike...
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