Rap Genius is about to blow up. The fan-favorite lyrics interpretation site has just lined up a major new investor in Andreesen Horowitz, the blue chip venture capital firm that has also backed Facebook, Twitter and dozens of other influential Web companies.
The investment is of a healthy $15 million and will be used to help the team at Rap Genius build out other properties that explain things like poetry, literature, the bible and legal and science texts. The Rap Genius model of allowing masses of users to annotate the texts will be applied in each case.
Though Rap Genius has been embraced by hip hop fans and rappers from very early on, it wasn't actually born out of the hip hop community, per se. Rather the startup had a much more traditional origin story— its founders were three Yale grads who hatched the idea for fun and got accepted into the famed Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator.
In a blog post, Marc Andreesen said Rap Genius has the potential to become the "Internet Talmud," likening the service to the authoritative annotated version of the Torah. Who knew that hip hop would ever take it this far?
[via The Verge]
