Our €5.5m Series A investment in VideoElephant
“The Dublin-led team aggregates premium video content from hundreds of content providers, licensing this content to well-known online web publishers”
Our €5.5m Series A investment in VideoElephant
We are thrilled to announce our follow on and series A investment in portfolio company VideoElephant.
Founded in 2012, VE will use the new funds to expands its global workforce across its offices in Dublin, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Sydney.
The platform is growing at its fastest-ever rate, with over 2000 videos, covering world news, entertainment and lifestyle, becoming available on the platform every day.
The Problem & Solution
The idea for VE was hatched when founder Stephen O’Shaughnessy created a series 500 travel videos of cities from all over the world for a portfolio of websites he owned. In doing so he explored the potential of licensing his videos to larger publishers but discovered that there was no centralised marketplace where video producers could syndicate the content. He identified this as the opportunity to build a platform where publishers could access videos from multiple sources centrally – VideoElephant was born.
Founder Stephen O’Shaughnessy explains’;
“Video is quickly being accepted as the most engaging format for consumers to digest content, and advertisers are increasingly betting that video is the most effective way to spread their message. This creates an interesting fro web publishers – how to publish enough engaging video content in order to attract the growing advertising budgets looking to target the right traffic. VideoElephant delivers that video content seamlessly within seconds”.
Why did we lead the Series A?
A note from our general partner John O’Sullivan;
“When we started working with VideoElephant and invested in them with the @AIB accelerator fund, the concept was really strong – but getting two sided marketplaces to work – is quite a ‘chicken & egg’ type problem. But they did it. They convinced the owners of some the best video content available to work with them and test whether this could work at scale for publishers – and they proved they were right, to their partners and the market. We invested through the early stages and now we have been able to dial that up with this large investment”.
