SoundCloud continues devouring giant piles of money – including nearly all of the $70 million invested by Twitter.
Variety reports that Twitter’s 2017 annual report released on Friday reveals that Twitter has written down a total of $66.4 of the $70 million it invested just one year earlier:
SoundCloud finally secured a Hail Mary deal that included $170 million of new funding from the Raine Group and Singapore’s Temasek in August of 2017. However, that deal came with a corporate restructure that wiped out many of the start-up’s early investors, and ultimately also forced out SoundCloud’s founding CEO Alexander Ljung.
SoundCloud at the time had been valued as a $700 million company, but the cash poor service has since plunged in value to $150 million – barely twice Twitter’s initial investment.
Readers may recall Twitter’s earlier, equally futile music projects, like “Twitter #Music,” which sought to rebrand the somewhat aimless platform with the added value of being a music discovery engine. After purchasing “We Are Hunted” to serve as Twitter’s standalone music app in 2013, Twitter #Music was officially shuttered barely a year later.