Beatrobo
Social music player that allows its users to collect and share music and videos from the web.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
|---|---|---|---|
| investor investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | $2.4m | Series B | |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Beatrobo, founded in 2012 by Hiroshi Asaeda and Hideyuki Takei, began as a social music service and evolved to bridge the gap between digital content and physical items. The company was established in Tokyo, Japan, with a vision influenced by co-founder Hiroshi Asaeda's multicultural upbringing in both Japan and the United States. This background inspired him to create products with universal appeal, much like Nintendo games. Asaeda, a serial entrepreneur, has been involved in various ventures, including maid-themed hair salons, before launching Beatrobo.
The company's initial offering was a social music platform that used customizable robot avatars to represent users' playlists. These avatars would visit friends' virtual rooms to play music, creating a passive and social music discovery experience aimed at 'lazy music lovers'. The platform's revenue model was designed around virtual goods, such as avatar customizations and branded robots for artists and celebrities to promote their content.
A significant development in Beatrobo's journey was the creation of PlugAir, a small hardware device that plugs into a smartphone's headphone jack. Conceived by CTO Hideyuki Takei, PlugAir acts as a physical key to unlock and download digital content, including music, videos, and photos, from the cloud via a companion app. This device was positioned as a modern-day mixtape or a replacement for CDs, offering a tangible way to share digital content without complex registration processes. The company secured patents for this technology. To scale production and distribution, Beatrobo partnered with the Japanese convenience store chain Lawson, which also invested $1.1 million in the company. In total, Beatrobo raised approximately $1.7 million in funding over two seed rounds from investors including KLab Ventures, Mistletoe, and CyberAgent Capital.
Keywords: social music discovery, digital mixtape, PlugAir, music hardware, content delivery, physical to digital, avatar playlist, Hiroshi Asaeda, Hideyuki Takei, Japanese startup, music technology, content authentication, virtual goods, social music platform, artist promotion, Lawson partnership, content merchandising, cloud content