Passionflix, a romance-focused streaming service run by Elon Musk’s sister Tosca Musk, has raised $9.4 million in a funding round led by AMC Networks.
The influx of funding was reported Wednesday in an SEC filing, but individual investors were not named.
AMC Networks’ minority stake worth several million dollars was confirmed by a person familiar with the transaction, but AMC Networks did not reveal it in a filing of its own. The company had no comment when contacted by Deadline. Under SEC rules, investments qualifying as “material” must be reported by public companies, so the fact that AMC did not disclose it indicates the modest size of the transaction in the overall scheme of things. Still, AMC Networks has made investments before in entities like RLJ Entertainment and the streaming outlet Acorn and went on to acquire full control of them over time.
The targeted approach and modest footprint of Passionflix, which has just six employees, matches the niche streaming operation of AMC Networks. The company operates a portfolio of narrowly focused services like Shudder, Sundance Now and Allblk.
In an article about Passionflix in June, the New York Times described the service as “sort of a sexy Hallmark Channel.” Since its launch in 2017, the company had raised $22 million before the latest round. In addition to serving as CEO of Passionflix, Tosca Musk also directs some of its original movies.
Other investors in Passionflix include Norman Lear and First Look Media, a production entity and parent of Topic Studios and the streaming service Topic.
“We fully understand that we’re walking at the feet of elephants,” First Look CEO Michael Bloom told the Times, referring to the handful of broad-audience streamers like Netflix and Disney+, which account for more than three-quarters of the total streaming market. “But we’re not trying to be them. There is an opportunity for specialty services like Passionflix to superserve a particular audience in a way that the big, mainstream retail guys don’t do.”