January 2009 Online Video Investments

1/6/09

RipCode

How much did the company raise?
$12.5 milion, Series C

What does the company do?
Video transcoding for multiscreen delivery

Who are the company's investors?
Granite Ventures
Hunt Ventures, El Dorado Ventures, Vesbridge Partners and ATA Ventures

What qualified RipCode for this round of funding?
RipCode CEO Brendon Mills said RipCode's value proposition is moving video transcoding into a wire speed function, absorbing the complexity of transcoding for multiple file formats into a network transaction. Mills said this moves transcoding away from a manual "bureau process" where the video is taken off the network and manipulated, before being moved back onto the network.

"Our solution takes transcoding to the point where it is much like streaming or progressive download in terms of processing time," Mills said.

How does the company plan to deploy the capital it drew down?
Mills said the company is in revenue stage now, and is aggressively expanding sales force to bring the product to market. He said gaining MySpace as a customer for transcoding for mobile devices was a big win that continues to get a lot of resources as well.

1/7/09

OneTrueMedia

How much did the company raise?
$9 million, Series B

What does the company do?
Online video advertising, focused on small to medium-sized businesses

Who are the company's investors?
DAG Ventures
NTT Finance, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

What qualified OneTrueMedia for this round of funding?
OneTrueMedia CEO John Love said the company's track record of having proven technology was a good fit for the market it was entering, because it provides tools that enable non-technical end-users to create online videos easily and quickly. The company also handles a large volume of created videos per week, so it demonstrated it could handle scaling up the business, and One True Media launched SpotMixer in May 2008 to meet growing demand for a DIY video advertising platform.

Love mentioned the major partnerships that SpotMixer had forged as major factors in continued investment. SpotMixer has partnered with Super Pages, Yellow Book, and, most importantly, Google, giving the company a solid distribution network for the product.

Lastly, Love said the company's relationship with Kleiner Perkins, which provided the seed funding for the company, "opened a lot of doors" for OneTrueMedia as it sought additional funding to expand its original consumer-facing product into the business market.

How does the company plan to deploy the capital it drew down?
Love said the website, service, and infrastructure for OneTrueMedia's ad platform SpotMixer are already built and tested. He said the next step is to scale up immediately, which the company is using its funding to do. Love said investment in customer acquisition platforms will remain steady, though the company will be careful with its funding to increase runway.

OneTrueMedia is also actively developing measurement tools and experience to develop best practices across verticals and video formats to serve diverse customers.

Related article
SpotMixer parent gets $9M in Series B

1/15/09

Motionbox

How much did the company raise?
$6 million, Series C

What does the company do?
Personal video sharing

Who are the company's investors?
Constellation Ventures
Canaan Partners, SAS Investors

What qualified Motionbox for this round of funding?
Josh Grotstein, CEO of Motionbox, said the company's focus on doing one unique thing very well, in this case personal video, was the main reason for its success getting funding. "Motionbox is to personal videos what Shutterfly is to personal photos," Grotstein wrote in an email. "We provide a very safe, high quality, and easy-to-use platform to upload, edit, store, and share your video digital memories. We are not trying to be YouTube or Veoh or Hulu or Blip.tv, nor are we targeted at professional or semi-professional videographers, but rather to the "chief memory officers" of the family who don't want to learn what H.264 means, much less learn how to properly transcode files rendered using that format."

Grotstein also mentioned the fact that the company does not rely on advertising, but rather on the "high value nature of the personal digital memories with which Motionbox is entrusted" for its main source of revenue as another reason it drew down funding.

How does the company plan to deploy the capital it received?
Motionbox plans to devote the capital to general operations, product development and deployment, and support of expansion through some key partnerships which will be announced soon, according to Grotstein.

1/21/09

Fliqz

How much did the company raise?
$6 million, Series C

What does the company do?
White-label enterprise video solutions

Who are the company's investors?
Triangle Peak Partners
Mohr Davidow Ventures

Fliqz declined to comment for this report