Discovr releases Mac app, hits 1M downloads, gets $1.1M funding (exclusive)

Australian mobile music startup Filter Squad hit one million downloads for its iOS app Discovr today, released a version of the app for Macs and closed a $1.1 million seed round of funding.

Discovr lets you find music by entering an artist you like in the search field. Based on that artist, the app will show you an interactive map of potential songs and artists you would enjoy. And believe it or not, the company is seeing the most traction from neither Australia, nor the US. It’s coming from Japan.

“[The Japanese] are technophiles. They love technology and they have a strong musical love as well,” explained Filter Squad founder and chief executive David McKinney in an interview with VentureBeat. “There is a really great intersection of different [technology] cultures in Japan. [Discovr is] music meets apps meets mobile, and they seem to be gobbling it up.”

The Mac app is Discovr’s third version. “People use desktops in a different way than mobile devices,” said David McKinney, founder and chief executive of Filter Squad, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’ve had a lot of people asking for the desktop app. We tried to satisfy.”

Yuuwa Capital saw something in the company’s traction and decided to inject another seed round into Filter Squad. The company originally received a $200,000 seed round from Yuuwa in January. Filter Squad plans to use the money to make more hires and focus on product development. Currently, the company is halfway through coding its first Android version of Discovr.

There has been a recent push to enrich the Australian technology scene, which McKinney says is not very big at this point. According to him, many Australian companies look to the United States to stay in the tech-know. Investing in Australia, however, has seemed to pick up, with Filter Squad as the latest example. (Design outsourcing company 99 Designs recently decided to double its Australian team to solidify itself in the country’s burgeoning tech culture.)

Currently, Discovr is a number one app in 28 countries. Filter Squad was founded in January 2011 and has four employees. Check out how it works in the video below:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zS_c57LLUU]