Panvidea Secures Additional $2 Million in Series A Financing
Investment Signals Growing Importance of Enterprise Cloud Solutions for Media Processing
New York, NY(18 Mar 2010)
Panvidea, a global leader in the on-demand video preparation, processing and distribution of entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform, has today announced that it has closed approximately $2 million in a second round of Series A funding.
The round was led by new investor DFJ Gotham Ventures and also included participation from Contour Venture Partners, eValue, NYCSeed and Wider Wake Network. This round follows a seed round of $1 million from Greycroft Partners in December 2008. "We welcome our new investors, all of whom have been working closely with us to help grow the business," said Chris Cali, CEO and Co-founder of Panvidea. "Their experience and relationships are already paying dividends."
Daniel Schultz, Co-founder and Managing Director of DFJ Gotham Ventures, who recently joined Panvidea's board of directors said: "Panvidea represents an entirely new model for multi-platform video distribution with no other vendor offering a post production and delivery solution that is as fast, scalable, or cost effective. Panvidea is leading the way toward an entirely new digital media supply chain and this investment is a unique opportunity to leverage the significant advantages of cloud-based technology and capitalize on the continually expanding growth of convergent video."
Jay MacDonald, Managing Partner at eValue, also joined Panvidea's board of directors, bringing over 20 years of experience as an investor and investment banker focused on the digital media and general media sectors in the U.S. and Europe. eValue is the venture capital firm founded by global entrepreneur, Thomas Falk, in Autumn 2006 after his online-marketing firm, Falk eSolutions AG was acquired by DoubleClick/Google.
The capital is being used to significantly invest in both immediate and ongoing product development and to re-launch the brand within the market. Specific product enhancements, that have attracted the major new clients of A&E Television Networks, Fox Broadcasting Company and Getty Images include:
- -- A more powerful and user-friendly dashboard with real-time monitoring;
- -- Increased system performance enabled by detailed input file analysis and enhanced resource allocation algorithms;
- -- New video processing capabilities such as standards conversion, audio downmixing, commercial slate creation and support for broad range of broadcast quality formats; and
- -- Updated service packages based on content hours output instead of per-GB in and out to encourage high-quality video sources.
"The closure of funding and re-launch of Panvidea positions us further into the professional broadcast encoding and post-production markets," said Cali. "Panvidea combines an instantly scalable, cloud-based post production and encoding engine with an integrated online dashboard for managing the entire video processing workflow from ingest to delivery. Through continued product development and performance enhancements, we automate many non-creative post-production and video encoding processes, enabling content owners, advertisers and broadcasters to realize instant and significant cost savings while improving quality and speed of distribution".
"We're witnessing a seismic shift in the way content is distributed and consumed," said Ian Sigalow, partner with Greycroft, LLC. "The old models for content preparation are permanently broken. Media companies no longer need to make large capital investments in enterprise systems or pay expensive hourly rates for slow, manual workstation-based dubs. Panvidea's flexible cloud-based platform changes the rules for professional content distribution."
About Panvidea:
Panvidea is a global leader in the preparation, processing and distribution of professional entertainment and advertising content across any digital platform. Originally founded as mPOINT in November 2007, the company re-branded in Spring 2010 with co-founder Chris Cali as CEO, to become Panvidea. Panvidea provides the only instantly scalable, on-demand solution to encode digital media elements, manage relevant metadata, edit and transform media for multiple audiences, and supply content as digital products to any platform or device. Panvidea's secure software service eliminates the need for professional content companies to incur significant capital expenditures or pay exorbitant hourly fees to prepare their content for internal use or external digital distribution.
About Greycroft Partners
Greycroft Partners is a venture capital partnership formed to invest in promising digital media companies, including both business and consumer-focused ventures. The firm's $75 million fund includes participation from leading corporate executives around the world. Graycroft's portfolio companies benefit from active, hands-on assistance in all phases of expansion, including marketing, financing, and management development. They also leverage an extensive network of media and technology industry connections to help investees gain visibility, build strategic relationships, and successfully bring their products to market. For more information, please visit: www.greycroftpartners.com.
About DFJ Gotham
DFJ Gotham Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City focused primarily on early-stage information technology companies on the East Coast. DFJ Gotham partners with extraordinary teams of entrepreneurs to build strong and successful businesses that make a huge impact in their industries. DFJ Gotham Ventures takes pride in being an active partner, leveraging its experience, knowledge and relationships to provide substantial value to its portfolio companies. DFJ Gotham Ventures is proud to have backed such category leaders as Massive (acquired by MSFT), XOsoft (acquired by CA), Q-Link (acquired by Adobe), Mimeo.com, ContextWeb, Worktopia and Drop.io, among many others. For more information, please visit www.dfjgotham.com.