Vidyard, the Kitchener startup that helps customers monitor the performance of their video-based marketing, has raised a US$35 million (C$49.7 million) Series C financing round, which will help it to develop new products.
The company said in a release today the financing was led by Waltham, Mass.-based Battery Ventures with participation from existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners of Menlo Park, Calif., Salesforce Ventures of San Francisco, OMERS Ventures of Toronto, iNovia Capital of Montreal and SoftTech VC of Palo Alto, Calif.
The company was formed by Co-Founders CEO Michael Litt, Devon Galloway and Edward Wu more than four years ago to develop software to host marketing videos and analyze their performance. Vidyard last January said its sales had risen 1,000 percent in 18 months, and company officials have since said the growth has been “consistent.”
The Vidyard statement said the company has now raised more than $60 million. It did not reveal the valuation applied to the funding round.
Vidyard's Spacecamp Shows its Creativity
The company said that the funding comes as video is establishing itself as a cornerstone of modern marketing. Video now accounts for 64 percent of all Internet traffic, and Cisco predicts that number to rise to 80 percent by 2019, said the statement. In B2B markets, more than 90 percent of businesses say video is becoming more important, 69 percent are increasing investments in video this year, and 80 percent are now dedicating in-house resources to video production.
“Video is revolutionizing marketing, and Vidyard is clearly innovating in this space,” said Michael Brown, general partner at Battery Ventures, who will join the Vidyard board. “We’re convinced that video will not only grow as a strategic platform for marketing and sales, but also as a critical solution for other business functions across every industry.”
Vidyard is clearly benefiting from this trend.
In 2015, for the second year in a row, Vidyard’s revenue tripled and its number of employees doubled. Participation in its annual Space Camp video marketing summit tripled year-over-year, and its growing base of customers now includes 24 of the top 100 global software companies. Its clients include such blue-chip companies as Honeywell, Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade, BMC Software, and Citibank.
“Video represents a massive opportunity for businesses to drive greater engagement with their message and to use second-by-second viewing data to understand the digital body language of potential buyers,” said Litt in the statement.
The press release said the company will use the funds to develop new products to help businesses expand their use of video for customer engagement and “tap into the digital body language of online audiences.”
The financing comes just one year after Vidyard raised an $18 million Series B financing led by
Bessemer.
There have been a flurry of major financing by companies in the Waterloo Region lately – most notably the US$50 million investment in chat leader Kik.com by China’s Tencent in the autumn.