Looks like instead of being acquired, wrist and speaker hardware company Jawbone is doing some acquiring, scooping up social and personalized music playlist app Playground.fm, according to a well-placed source.
Last time we heard something about Jawbone, it had closed a new financing round of about $250 million at around a $3 billion valuation. Kara Swisher and Re/code had reported a similar range at the time. We had also learned that the company was seeing a $600 million revenue run rate, mostly from its diminutive speaker products.
We have no word on the size of the Playground.fm deal, but did hear that the team and investors were happy and that it was over eight figures. Our source says that the startup was in the process of raising a funding round when Jawbone came in with a successful offer.
Playground.fm is a free music service on iOS and iPad and touts itself as “human-powered”radio. The app pulls your Facebook and Spotify data in order to build you a personalized radio station.
The company also has some appealing patented tech and a talented founding team deep in the music space, including Mehul Trivedi, the original iOS audio engineer at Apple, former Atlantic Records DJ Austin Soldner and Vivek Agrawal, a former Product and Business Development lead at Topspin.
Perhaps Jawbone is working on its own streaming music service — a Jambox Radio, if you will? In the game to own the full stack in every vertical you tackle, a move like this would make sense: “Buy a Jawbone speaker, get unlimited music streaming.”
And it would seem logical that Playground.fm would want to cast its lot with a platform like Jawbone versus being just another music app all on its lonesome.
Update: Jawbone has confirmed on the record that they bought Playground.fm last year.
Source: TechCrunch
