Mesmo.tv Raises Funding

Mesmo.tv, an online video discovery site, has raised most of a $900,000 Series A round, as first reported by Private Equity Hub. Participants in the round include active angel investors Felicis Ventures and Maples Investments. Mesmo.tv CEO Davin Miyoshi said Naval Ravikant’s Hit Forge and early Google employee George Harik participated as well.

We reviewed Mesmo.tv in June, saying it was off to a promising start as an Internet TV aggregator. At the time, the company had a site up as well as a Facebook app. In our testing, we’ve found the site slower and less user-friendly than competitors like Vadver’s recently launched ffwd.

However, Mesmo.tv has since launched a TV show trivia application on Facebook and had a lot of success with it — 1.3 million million registered users, and 10 percent of them using it daily.

Mesmo.tv is now putting all of its resources into the TV trivia Facebook app, according to Miyoshi, and will be bringing online video discovery to its users there, rather than driving them to the current incarnation of its site.

The company’s original Facebook app — the one that is more similar to its site — has been less successful, with about 1,500 users, and three percent of them active on a daily basis.

“Our whole philosophy is taking people from what they currently watch to video content they may not be as familiar with,” said Miyoshi. “That hasn’t changed.”