Kyle
In 2010 Napster’s co-founders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker quietly started making noise about a new start up. At that time it wasn’t clear if the two were reunited when Fanning received an early seed round of funding in the amount of $200,000 for a startup, at the time called SupYo, as in “What’s Up Yo”. At that time Supyo’s founders were listed as Fanning and Voxli founder Joey Liaw.
Almost a year to the day later in October 2011, Fanning and Parker had competed an $8.3 million series A round. Some of the top investor’s in Silicon Valley were involved including; Founder’s Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, Will I Am, Scott Braun and Michael Arrington. With an all star line up like that Parker and Fanning must be on to something big. All that is known so far is that it’s some kind of video chat.
More after the break
They’ve said up a splash page on their website that has an illustration of a command center or mission control of sorts. The screens at the mission control center have what looks like a group of friends video chatting and the workings of a tv station control room, not NASA.
Yesterday it was widely reported that Airtime was recruiting talent to finish building their product.
Today, SAI revealed that Airtime, which is being dubbed the Chatroulette of Facebook, already has 2,000 users. They are testing it in Facebook’s Open Graph platform. According to the SAI report Airtime has about 600 weekly users and 70 daily users which really isn’t bad for a startup in super stealth mode.
The funny thing is that Parker has been making the rounds in Silicon Valley, CES,and South By Southwest and talking a whole bunch but not saying anything about what Airtime is exactly.
It does look like, before too long, we’ll finally know the secret sauce in Airtime.
source: SAI
Background: TechCrunch
