Coppertino, a Los Angeles-based startup with Ukrainian origins, announced today that it has raised half a million dollars at an undisclosed valuation from leading Ukrainian investment firms AVentures and TA Venture as well as from Torben Majgaard, the Danish founder of Ukrainian IT-outsourcing company Ciklum.
Founded in 2011 by Petro Bondarevskyi and Ivan Ablamskyi, Coppertino has maintained its R&D center in Ukraine. Its main product, VOX, is a minimalist and free music player for Mac capable of handling any audio format.
Since its launch last year, VOX has become one of the most popular music players for Mac, amassing 500,000 downloads. In order to expand the service, Coppertino has announced integration with SoundCloud, Deezer, Spotify, Rdio, Grooveshark, free-music library Jamendo, and personalized internet-radio service Aupeo.
The company also states that they have negotiated with musicians such as Egyptian hip-hop artist Deeb, DJ London Elektricity, Moby, and German DJ ATB regarding the prospect of partnerships.
A major Ukrainian investment fund founded in 2000, AVentures is led by Andrey Kolodyuk and Yevgen Sysoyev. It focuses mainly – but not exclusively – on startups from Ukraine, or with Ukrainian roots. Their portfolio includes virtual-reality developer Augmented Pixels, VM-storage service StarWind Software, enterprise software developer nuPSYS, and coding-game Check iO.
TA Venture is a leading venture fund that is backed by $50 million in committed capital and led by Viktoriya Tigipko. Exits include a pair of deals in November 2013 to leave New York City-based mobile-booking service WeHostels (acquired by student-oriented travel agency StudentUniverse) and Indian pure-play billing-aggregator Qubecell (acquired by mobile-billing service Boku) and a deal in January 2014 to leave Little Eye Labs, an Indian startup which developed a performance-analysis and monitoring tool (acquired by Facebook).
Majgaard, who hails from Denmark, founded the IT-outsourcing company Ciklum in 2002 and has built it into one of the of the largest companies in this market in Eastern Europe. In addition to working the CEO at Ciklum, Majgaard sits on the board of the Brain Basket Foundation, a project launched by the Ukrainian government and domestic IT-sector representatives to fund 100,000 software developers by 2020 and to boost the country’s tech market.
This latest round adds to the $400,000 in seed funding that Coppertino raised from AVentures in July 2013, bringing the total investment amount to $900,000.
