Althea Systems, a Bangalore based social video browser startup that launched its Adobe Air based application Shufflr.tv two months ago, has raised $3 million in Series A funding from an institutional venture capitalist, co-founder Rajnish R told MediaNama. Rajnish declined to disclose the company's backers, saying that the VC wants to make an announcement at their own discretion; he also declined to comment on how much stake ahs been sold. The $3 million is on the basis of what the company has planned to do over the next 18-20 months, the products they intend to roll out and the markets they want to reach. Shufflr.tv provides a clean interface for discovering new content, and has content deals inked with NDTV, Reuters, CNBC-TV18, BigFlix in India, the BBC and MSNBC in the UK, and also with Brightcove which aggregates a large number of content providers. They're also aggregating content from YouTube, DailyMotion, Metacafe and Yahoo Videos, are in talks with STAR TV, and working on breaking into the larger US based customers. The focus, clearly, is the global market, and while the company has declined to disclose its total number of users, Rajnish says that initially they saw users from US, UK, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India and Pakistan, and after launching Spanish content, from Spain and Latin American countries. The Shufflr Premise; Plans To Open Up API; Platforms & Devices Shufflr works on the premise that there is a substantially large amount of video content available on the Internet…
