Leading this Series C round is Battery Ventures, the busy Boston-area fund that has already contributed this year to deals worth more than $250-million. Previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners, OMERS Ventures, iNovia Capital and Salesforce Ventures are also participating. 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.
Vidyard, which was founded in 2010, develops software that helps businesses track the effectiveness of video in their marketing and training efforts. It counts Honeywell International Inc, Citigroup Inc and LinkedIn Corp among its customers.
Video now accounts for more than half of mobile traffic, and can boost marketing campaigns significantly, accounting for 64 percent of all Internet traffic. Cisco predicts that number to rise to 80 percent by 2019. In April, Facebook shared that more than 4 billion videos were played each day on its platform alone, and by September that number had doubled to 8 billion. In B2B markets, over 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.
Vidyard – whose video platform helps marketing and sales teams boost engagement in their video content, track individual viewing activities, and report on video ROI – saw exponential growth in market demand and utilization of its platform in 2015.
Vidyard CEO Michael Litt said the cash came as a result of conversations that began months ago.
“They looked at our total addressable market and saw the company can IPO and become a really big business, or we could build a multi-billion-dollar business and have a huge impact on organizations all over the world,” Litt said.
Michael Brown, general partner at Battery Ventures who will be joining the board of directors at Vidyard said, “Vidyard can help businesses realize the full potential of video, not just as a content medium, but as an incredible source of business analytics and customer insight.”
The deal is one of the first sizable venture investments of the year in Canada and comes after 2015 saw venture capital hit levels not seen in this country since the peak of the dot-com frenzy in 2002. According to Thomson Reuters, some $2.5-billion was invested in 542 financing rounds, with seven deals running more than $50-million.
Vidyard customers have now used video content and viewer engagement data to:
- Identify more than 35 million new business leads
- Tap into the digital body language of more than 200 million buyers
- Boost engagement in marketing and sales campaigns by more than 500 percent
