Movie ratings site Flixster raised issued $12.5 million in new shares funding, according to an SEC filing. The last time Flixster raised money was a $5 million Series B in April, 2008. The new round brings the company’s total capital raised to $19.5 million.
Flixster operates both a Web site and a companion iPhone app, which is the most popular movie app in the App Store. The iPhone app lets consumers find nearby movies, add their ratings, and buy tickets. In January, the company bought Rotten Tomatoes from News Corp for an undisclosed sum. The combined reach of the two movie review services is 30 million people, according to the companies.
The new capital could be tied to the purchase. According to the filing, the first sale of securities in this round was on December 31, 2009, just a few days before the deal closed. Flixster probably used the money, at least in part, to finance the acquisition.
Update CEO Joe Greenstein got back to us. He says, “We actually have not raised any new money recently.” The SEC filing was in relation to the Rotten Tomatoes transaction and “was describing shares issued to News Corp” as part of that deal. He cautions against concluding that the $12.5 million was the valuation of the deal, but it is hard to come to any other conclusion since it was an all-stock transaction. Of course, there are many different ways to come up with a valuation for an acquisition, and the numbers reported to the SEC might not be the same as the numbers the companies used to justify the deal to their boards. Greenstein won’t get into what that valuation was, but he does share that Flixster’s mobile applications on the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry recently crossed 11 million users.