Titan OS raises $58 million from Highland Europe for its smart TV OS

TV makers need to get more lifetime value from a customer after selling a unit. With more competition in the market, companies often need to sell TVs at a discounted price with lower margins. The best way for them to recover the money is by striking partnerships with channels, streaming services, and advertisers.

This is the core thesis around Barcelona-based Titan OS, which provides a smart TV operating system to TV makers with a promise to get better lifetime value out of the customer.

The company said today it has raised €50 million ($58 million) in Series A funding, led by Highland Europe, with participation from Mangrove Capital Partners. The company didn’t specify how much money it has raised to date, but said that its seed round, raised in 2023, was in double-digit millions.

The startup was founded in 2023 by Jacinto Roca, Timothy Edwards, Miquel Barba, and Tobias Pfalzgraff. Roca previously founded a streaming startup called Wukai.tv and sold it to Rakuten. Other co-founders have also held various roles at Rakuten.

Titan OS now serves 18 million users, largely across Europe and Latin America, via partnerships with Phillips and JVC.

The software is designed to help users discover content easily, as Nielsen said in 2023 that the time spent trying to find content to watch has increased. Titan OS aims to use data insights from users and its vast content portfolio to reduce that time. Across the OS, users have access to a mix of broadcast TV, streaming apps that they subscribe to, along with FAST (free ad-supported television) channels from Titan OS’s partners.

For the company, revenue opportunity lies in a few key areas. First, it partners with many FAST services to help them reach the local audience. Second, there are advertising opportunities on the home screen of the TV and during streams that reach millions of users. The company said its content partners are eager to reach new audiences through advertising, especially event-heavy content channels that show sports.

Titan OS also offers shoppable ads that have customers perform actions like scanning a QR code to buy an item. The startup said that through these areas, it has grown 10x in revenue in two years.

While TV makers like Sony might not shed their core operating system, they are keen to partner with companies like Titan OS to offer more FAST channels to their customers. Multiple reports suggest that for TV makers, advertising is becoming a more lucrative revenue-earning option than hardware itself. Titan OS COO Edwards buys into this ethos.

“It used to be the case that hardware manufacturers made most of their profit from selling the device itself. But now, some hardware manufacturers that have their own operating system make more profit from ongoing content and advertising revenues than they do from actually selling the hardware. And this is a big change,” he told TechCrunch over a call.

“What we offer them [TV companies] is an ability to generate ongoing content and advertising revenues after the device is sold, which is not the status quo in the market.”

Edwards said that, to expand the company’s footprint in Europe, the company is bolstering its portfolio of local language ad-supported channels catered to each geography. With this strategy, the startup, which competes with the likes of Whale TV and Xperi’s TiVO, offers over 100 channels in these markets.

The company currently has 200 people across three offices in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Taipei. The additional funding will help Titan OS bolster the staff across product and sales, work on new partnerships, and create new advertising projects. The company aims to maintain its growth curve and raise additional funding next year.

Laurance Garrett, a partner at Highland Europe, equated Titan OS with WeTransfer, the VC firm’s investment that was acquired by Bending Spoons.

“With Titan OS, there is the beauty of the advertising model on top of the actual core OS. It was something we could identify with [from their experience with WeTransfer], and the partners loved it,” he said.

Garrett added that with Titan OS’s European roots, the company can better understand the nitty-gritty of the local market as compared to players coming in from abroad.