$6m in funding uploaded to Boxee

Boston-based General Catalyst lead a new round of capital-infusion for Boxee, a company that saw $4m roll in in December from some of the same partners.

In a statement on their blog, Boxee announced the second round of funding:

We are happy to announce that Boxee closed a $6M round of financing led by Boston-based General Catalyst with participation by prior investors Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. Neil Sequeira from General Catalyst will join our board.

We closed our Series A late last year, but given the momentum and opportunities we’ve seen over the past few months, we thought it made sense to bring in a new partner and additional funds.

General Catalyst brings more than just money to the table. We wanted a partner to help us as we strengthen our relationships with big media and cable companies. As we learned (the hard way), it is a complicated world.. Neil and General Catalyst as a firm have years of experience, deep understanding, and extensive network in these industries, and we are looking forward to working together with them.

Boxee also let us in on what they plan to do with the funding. Boxee wants to focus on shoring up the service, which won’t be in beta until this fall, as well as adding more content . They also indicated a push to entice developers, and enhance and monetize Boxee’s App Store, which they say “needs some love.”

Another focus of the new funding is broadening Boxee’s reach beyond those intrepid folks who will connect a computer to a TV. It may seem like no big deal, but we all have those co-workers who can’t connect their own mice, so making Boxee more “accessible for a mainstream consumer” could be make or break for the fledgling service.

Boxee CEO Avner Ronen spoke to CNet about hopes that Hulu will play nice, soon, too:

“I think that the best thing that we could do in order to become partners with Hulu is, on one end, work with other media companies so they see that Boxee is overall a friendly company to content owners,” CEO Avner Ronen told CNET News. “And the second is that we need to grow our footprint, we need to grow our user base, we need to get on more digital devices, and I think if we do those things it will open the opportunity up for us to partner with Hulu.”

“Our belief is that, eventually, content owners need to follow the users,” Ronen said.