California:  California based publisher of Smart TV apps, Flingo has secured $7 million in its series A round of funding from August Capital. As a part of the investment, David Marquardt and Howard Hartenbaum from August Capital would be joining Flingo’s Board of Directors. The funds would be used to expand the company’s device presence and the automatic content recognition infrastructure (ACR), hire more people, invest in the infrastructure, and build a portfolio of intellectual property.

“We were fortunate to have several investors competing with each other to lead our round and I think that’s because of two factors: we always operated with spending-discipline to maintain profitability; and we targeted a high-growth market with big potential before it became sexy and high-profile due to Google and Apple’s announcements in this area,” says Ashsin Navin, CEO & Co-Founder, Flingo.

Flingo was co-founded in 2008 by Ashwin, Alvir Navin, and David Harrison.  It has less than 50 employees, who are primarily in its headquarters in San Francisco. It also plans to hire people for its offices in New York, LA, Tokyo, Seoul, and Taipei. Ashwin has also founded I/O Ventures and BitTorrent. He was an Advisor at OpenDNS and Mochi Media. He was also a Board Member at Crunchyroll and an Investor at HappyCow. He handled the Corporate Development at Yahoo! and was an Equity Research Analyst at Godlman Sachs. Ashwin was also an Analyst at Epoch Partners and an Investment Banker at Merrill Lynch. He holds a B.A in Government and Economics from Claremont McKenna.

Ashwin says, “We entered the market with a simple idea: let’s make it easy for media companies to deploy their own branded TV App on all of the major TV platforms in one shot, rather than building 15 different apps for 15 different OEMs. Many media companies have used our tools to reach Smart TVs, including A&E Networks, Fox, Warner Brothers, Comcast, TV Guide and about 65 others. We learnt that for Smart TV to be truly ‘smart,’ apps shouldn’t be discovered only in the TV’s app store, but they should be able to integrate with watching regular broadcast TV. We think SyncApps will be the most compelling way to improve the viewer’s experience for TV since we left black and white for color.”

Ashwin estimates the television advertising industry at $170 billion worldwide, and $60 billion in the U.S. alone. He thinks that Smart TVs will play a profound role in helping marketers measure and tune that advertising spend in a better way. He feels that Flingo will give the consumers more control over the advertising experience thereby improving the value of TV advertising.

Talking about the competition Ashwin says, “There are many companies in the Social TV arena. We all have unique approaches that have merit, but we are the first company to drive intelligence into the Smart TV itself rather than the Smart Phone or Tablet. We think the Phone and Tablet are important but apps running there will ultimately query the television for context and viewer preferences.”

August Capital is a VC firm which manages over$1.3 billion and has invested in more than 75 companies. Its famous portfolio companies include Aardvark (acquired by Google), Actel, Acumos (acquired by Cirrus Logic), Blippy, BroadLogic, Zulily, Xirrus, Ubicom, Intuit, and many others.