New York-based Genius has sold its assets to a company called MediaLab for $80m, according to Bloomberg. Which would be an exit to celebrate for many companies, but in Genius’s case it’s only a few million more than the $77.7m of funding it has raised since it was founded in 2009 as Rap Genius.
(Note, there’s some degree of uncertainty here: the $77.7m figure comes from CrunchBase, but Bloomberg’s report claimed that the $80m assets sale was “less than the total funding raised”.)
Genius’s focus has been on music lyrics, and the context provided for them by its users, and often the artists themselves.
“We are restructuring the way in which original content is produced at Genius and as part of that some very talented individuals on the content and production teams were let go,” said MediaLab.
“The scale of the community platform is what attracted us to Genius and this is where we will be heavily investing going forward, with a renewed focus on emerging artists.”
MediaLab also owns messaging app Kik, anonymous social app Whisper and mixtapes service DatPiff.
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