Live-stream app First Meerkat raises $14M in Hollywood

First Meerkat conquered the South by Southwest tech festival in Texas. Now it is laying claim to Hollywood.

The live-streaming mobile app revealed Thursday it has raised $14 million from a who’s who of Tinseltown investors. Those include Hollywood talent agencies WME, CAA Ventures and UTA, as well as Broadway Ventures, the investment vehicle of “Saturday Night Live” producer Lorne Michaels.

That’s despite that fact that Twitter launched a Meerkat-killer on Thursday, called Periscope, a live-streaming app it quietly acquired in January for nearly $100 million.

Early reviewers said Periscope has more features than Meerkat, most notably the ability to replay streams for 24 hours after they’re broadcast.

Perhaps even more significant, Periscope users can link the app to their Twitter accounts and broadcast videos to their followers.

That had originally been the case with Meerkat at the SXSW Interactive festival earlier this month.

But in less than two days, Twitter had cut Meerkat off from its “social graph,” which allows an app to automatically link to a user’s followers.

Even with that setback, Meerkat’s investors are betting that the app can gain enough users for a critical mass of its own. Early enthusiasts have included NBC’s Al Roker and late-night host Jimmy Fallon.

“It’s a brand-new medium,” Josh Elman of Greylock Partners, which led Meerkat’s latest funding round, told The Post. “Stars and content creators are going to be able to create more stuff in between, behind the scenes.”

Other Meerkat backers include investor David Tisch, YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, actor and singer Jared Leto, Vayner/RSE and Comcast Ventures.

Nevertheless, Periscope is rapidly forming high-profile ties of its own, including partnerships with news outlets like NBC’s “Today” show, the Huffington Post and Vox.