From the New York Times:
Investor reticence about the sex industry is changing notably, Mr. Gardiner said….
Mr. Gardiner said a key selling point in getting these deals done was to give the mainstream investors some public relations cover by repackaging the company in a more conventional way. For instance, he said, a company can still get a big chunk of revenue from the pornography industry but also branch out into mainstream business.
He cited as an example a company called Waat Media, which aggregates and distributes content to cellphones and has deals with several makers of explicit pornography, like Penthouse and the Vivid Entertainment Group. In September, Spark Capital, a mainstream venture capital firm, led a $12.5 million round of financing for Waat, but changed the company’s name to Twistbox Entertainment and packaged the company as a mobile content distributor.
Read it all (my emphasis).
I believe this was the Mafia’s approach to trying to legitimize itself as well.