Back in February, Re/code reported that Jawbone was nearly finished raising a $250 million round of funding led by Rizvi Traverse Management, the investment firm that has backed Twitter, Square, Flipboard and a number of others of late.
While Jawbone’s CEO and founder Hosain Rahman declined to comment on the round on stage at Disrupt NY this past week, he did reveal in the interview below that Rizvi Traverse is now an investor in the company.
The the entire round is not yet closed (apart from the amount from Rizvi Traverse), because it is a rolling close, sources tell us, but we’re hearing that Rizvi Traverse Management’s co-founder Suhail Rizvi is joining the company’s board.
Similar to the February report from Re/code’s Kara Swisher, we’ve also heard from sources that the round is in the $300 million range and the valuation is around $3.3 billion. Our sources say that there are multiple parties are showing interest in the round, including top tier investors from various asset classes (early stage as well as late stage, and public company investors). We also hear that Jawbone is considering taking more than $300 million in funding because of the interest.
Not counting this recent round, Jawbone has raised more than $275 million in venture capital, along with $100 million in debt and equity financing.
A new round of funding would certainly give Jawbone the financial capital to continue to go deep on its fitness tracker, the UP, as well as double down on its connected speaker, the Jambox; and potentially expand to new hardware and software products. During our conversation this past week, Rahman talked a lot about how he thinks the future of connected wearables is to allow a user to interact with their connected devices and connected homes.
“Tomorrow is all about more information, more signals, more understanding of yourself, but then taking all of that and really crunching it,” he said. “Taking all that data, contextualizing it for the use and turning it that into understanding which leads to data [is the goal].”
We contacted Jawbone, who declined to comment on the specifics of the funding.