Last.fm Secures Series A Funding From Index Ventures

Last.fm Secures Series A Funding From Index Ventures

LONDON, May 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Last.fm, the free online social music network that connects people with their favorite music, today announced that it has secured its first institutional round of venture capital funding led by Index Ventures. Index Ventures joined angel investors and Internet community luminaries Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, and Stefan Glaenzer. Index Ventures' General Partners Neil Rimer and Danny Rimer also joined Last.fm's board of directors. Last.fm will use the funding to broaden its product offering and expand its business development efforts with the music industry.

Last.fm is an online community of music fans who share their musical tastes globally. By signing up for a Last.fm music profile, people discover new music, which has been recommended by listeners from all over the world. By linking their media players (iTunes, Winamp, etc.) to Last.fm, they can build up a personal music profile on their Last.fm homepage, receive recommendations and connect to other similar music fans.

"The way listeners discover music has radically changed with the evolution of second-generation Internet services," said Felix Miller, co-founder and CEO, Last.fm. "Music discovery at Last.fm is community-driven and based on social recommendations, not subjective analysis or editors, just what people listen to."

Last.fm's music catalogue recognizes over 40 million unique tracks, which have been submitted solely from its global community of listeners. Last.fm is committed to promoting new and unsigned music and currently has more than 8,000 independent artists and music labels using Last.fm.

"The Internet has evolved to become the most useful tool for listening to, discovering, and sharing music. Last.fm created a scalable solution that allows music fans across the globe to connect with each other and share new music and ideas," said Neil Rimer, general partner, Index Ventures. "Last.fm has amassed an amazing community of sophisticated music fans who are creating their own personal radio stations, discovering new music and finding others just like them."

About Last.fm

Founded in 2003 in London by Felix Miller, Martin Stiksel and Richard Jones, Last.fm is an online, social music network that connects people with music and the record labels with listeners. By joining the Last.fm community, music fans automatically share their favorite music by linking their media player (i.e. iTunes) to the Last.fm database, which is populated daily with over 10 million new track submissions from Last.fm music fans. The current board of directors includes CEO Felix Miller, Chairman Stefan Glaenzer, Danny Rimer and Neil Rimer from Index Ventures. Learn more about Last.fm at www.last.fm.

About Index Ventures

Index Ventures is a leading European venture capital firm active in technology venture investing since 1996. The firm is dedicated to helping top entrepreneurial teams both in the Information Technology and Life Science sectors build their companies into market defining global leaders. The firm has offices in Geneva, London and Jersey and focuses its investment activity primarily on Europe and Israel. Investments include Betfair (the world's largest betting exchange); Skype (the pioneering communications company, recently acquired by eBay); MySQL (the world's most popular open source database); Photoways (Europe's largest online photo-processing service) FON (the global wifi network) and Lovefilm (Europe's largest DVD rental business).

Source: Index Ventures

CONTACT: Sayula Kirby of Index Ventures: Europe, +44-207-154-2009, or
Sayula@indexventures.com; or United States, Julie Lydon of Spark PR, +1-603-
433-0086, or jlydon@sparkpr.com, for Index Ventures

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