JoyTunes, which has developed an app for learning musical instruments, is raising $50 million led by Google Ventures (GV) and with the participation of new investors Qualcomm Ventures and Hearst Ventures, a source close to the matter has told Globes, Trend reports.
The financing round, which is set to close, is at a company valuation of $1 billion, making JoyTunes the latest Israeli startup to become a unicorn.
Prior to this latest financing round, JoyTunes had raised $43 million from investors including Qumra Capital, Aleph, and Yelp founder Stoppelman. Overall the company has raised a relatively small amount of money in relation to its high valuation.
JoyTunes is exceptional on the Israeli startup landscape in that it turns to private users (C2B) rather than enterprises and organizations (B2B), which is the model for most Israeli startups.
JoyTunes was founded in 2011 by CEO Yuval Kaminka and his brother CTO Yigal Kaminka and musical director Roy Izkovsky. The company has 100 employees.
The company has developed several music software apps for teaching instruments with the main two being Simply Piano and Simply Guitar. These two apps are designed for amateur users taking their first steps in learning to play. The apps are available to people who pay a subscription for three months, six months or a year. A one year subscription for a US user costs $120.
The Simply Piano app is the company's oldest with Simply Guitar launched in February 2020 and available only in the Apple store but this month it became available on Android. Sources inform "Globes" that annual recurring revenue (ARR) from Simply Guitar has already reached $10 million and overall ARR has reached $100 million.
According to web behavior and traffic analytics company SimilarWeb (NYSE: SMWB), JoyTunes had 300,000 visits on its website and apps over the past six months, up 10% from the corresponding period last year. JoyTunes has consistently seen a rise in the number of visitors since the end of 2020, except for a slight dip in February. 33% of users are from the US and the rest are from the UK, Germany, Israel and Brazil.
According to the Apollo sales data platform, JoyTunes benefitted from the Covid-19 crisis with a major rise in use following the outbreak of the virus in the first quarter of 2020. The company's work force has risen 43% over the past two years.
JoyTunes major rivals are the Finnish company Yousician and a plethora of online courses and YouTube clips.