Fast-growing Irish online video distribution company VideoElephant has closed a €5.5 million funding round led by blue chip Irish investor Act Venture Capital.
The Dublin-headquartered company, founded in 2012, will use the new equity to expand its global workforce across its offices in Dublin, New York, Los Angeles, Berlin and Sydney. VideoElephant plans to almost double its workforce, as well as investing heavily in their IP and AI technology to support its growing library of over 2 million videos.
Working with global content powerhouses Bloomberg, Fox, Al Jazeera, Endemol, Billboard, Deutsche Welle, Los Angeles Times, among others, the Irish company has built a huge library of searchable, rights-cleared top-tier video content. VideoElephant works with ad tech providers, publishers and advertisers that require brand-safe video content at scale, while sharing the associated revenues with their content partners. The Dublin-led team aggregates premium video content from hundreds of content providers, licensing this content to well-known online web publishers. i.e Hearst, USA Today, Comcast, Gannett, ByteDance and The San Francisco Chronicle. The platform is growing at its fastest-ever rate, with over 2,500 new videos, covering world news, entertainment and lifestyle, becoming available on the platform every day.
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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 problem for 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.”
Online video is among the fastest-growing segments of the US advertising market. Advertisers and content producers are searching for a smart solution that allows them to operate in that market in a seamless way that doesn’t compromise on quality or user experience. VideoElephant is that solution.
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John O’Sullivan, who led the investment for Act, said: “When we started working with VideoElephant and invested in them with the AIB Fund, the concept was really strong – but getting two sided marketplaces to work – is quite a ‘chicken and egg’ type problem. But they did it. They convinced the owners of some of 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.”
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