Rap Genius Backed By $15 Million Investment

posted in: Music News • Urban

What’s the secret to obtaining $15 million in backing from a venture capitalist firm? Being the website Rap Genius.

Rap Genius, a popular crowdsourcing website where readers give their take on rap lyrics, recently received an astonishingly large investment from Andreessen Horowitz. The firm explained that while the public is double taking at this investment, their reasoning is sound. You can read a statement from the firm regarding the investment after the jump.

It turns out that Rap Genius has a much bigger idea and a much broader mission than that. Which is: Generalize out to many other categories of text¦ annotate the world¦ be the knowledge about the knowledge¦ create the Internet Talmud¦

There’s music in other genres and other languages, but what other categories? Poetry, literature, the Bible, political speeches, legal texts, science papers. And those are just the start. We think the community will continue to expand beyond rap into all culture. The potential of this company is large.

Finally, there’s the other reason “ maybe even the real reason “ why I’m so fired up about this idea and this investment. Only a handful of people know that the big missing feature from the web browser “ the feature that was supposed to be in from the start but didn’t make it “ is the ability to annotate any page on the Internet with commentary and additional information.”

You can read the full statement here.

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