‘YouTube For Business’, Vidyard, Raises $6M Series A Led By OMERS Ventures To Build Out Its Video Marketing & Analytics Platform
Vidyard, a Y Combinator alumnus and enterprise startup that sells a video marketing platform with embedded analytics tools to businesses to help them track and monetise video content, has closed a $6 million Series A led by Canada’s OMERS Ventures. Existing investors iNovia Capital and SoftTech VC also participated, along with a personal investment from Eloqua‘s Jill Rowley.
Michael Litt, founder and CEO of Vidyard, said the investment round will be used to build on ”significant momentum” in its business — with plans for growth including integrating more third party marketing products with the Vidyard platform and product development work to enhance the platform’s feature set. Vidyard already integrates with third party marketing automation platforms Eloqua and HubSpot.
The startup began life as a content production house making explainer-videos for other companies, before pivoting to create a ‘YouTube for businesses’, offering a video marketing platform which includes a dedicated video player, plus tools to manage, measure and optimise video content — to capitalise on the rise of online video.
“Video Marketing is a quickly emerging category. 2012 was filled with companies investing resources into creating video, 2013 is going to be about finding ways of leveraging that video content for increased conversion,” Litt tells TechCrunch. “Marketers are also looking for resources to help them both create and utilize their videos, so we’re taking it upon ourselves to create the resource dedicated to educating and creating the Video Marketing Category.”
Vidyard is not breaking out the number of customers it has yet but Litt says they range from SMB’s to Fortune500 companies — and include the likes of Deltek, Ceridian, RapGenius, The Juno Awards, FIS Global and Eloqua. From a revenue perspective, he says “January 2013 outpaced the entire calendar year 2012″ — but again, isn’t providing specific figures at this point.
Part of the Series A funding round will go towards doubling the size of Vidyard’s engineering and product team in order to meet the scale of the technical challenges the business tackles. ”None of this is easy, we need the right team to do it. We’re also solving a very difficult technical problem and need the Engineering and Product team to scale in support of the constant innovation we’re throwing at them. Look to see our Engineering team double this year and with that scale ~10,000 square feet of new workspace,” says Litt.
Commenting on the investment in a statement, Derek Smyth, Managing Director of Omers Ventures, said the company address ”a clear and significant need in a rapidly growing market”, adding: ”Vidyard’s founders took the initiative to develop a valuable and easy-to-use solution for a challenge they faced every day in their own businesses. Their deep domain expertise and applied innovation is what attracted Omers Ventures to make this investment.”
So how does the ‘YouTube for business’ celebrate its Series A? By making a celebratory video of course. And indulging in a spot of fancy-dress.
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