After another year of explosive growth, B2B video marketing platform Vidyard has secured an additional $35 million in venture capital to help drive its rapid expansion in Canada and abroad.
Vidyard provides software for producing, delivering and measuring marketing videos across owned and earned digital channels. It plugs directly into CRM automation platforms like Salesforce and Marketo, so marketers and sales reps can send targeted video messages to prospects, then see which leads are watching them.
The platform now serves 500 enterprise clients mainly in the tech sector, including Lenovo, LinkedIn, Cision, TD Ameritrade, and Citibank.
“With the ability to track, right down to the second, how long a buyer engages in a message, we can gain immediate insight into what they’re interested in and how far down the buying path they are,” said Meagan Eisenberg, CMO at Vidyard client MongoDB, in a statement.
Vidyard’s Series C round comes just a year after it completed an $18 million Series B, bringing its total funding to more than $60 million. The most recent round was led by U.S. VC firm Battery Ventures, which has also funded successful tech startups like Marketo, Neolane, Bluekai and Omniture.
Michael Litt, CEO and co-founder of the Kitchener-based company and Marketing 30 Under 30 alumnus,, said that Battery set out to invest in enterprise software for video marketing, and concluded Vidyard had the most promising technology and vision.
“From a social perspective, video became a huge category [in 2015],” he said. “If consumers want to see and experience video and want to be sold to with video, the enterprise and business markets will as well. So [Battery] started looking at companies that were capitalizing on this.”
According to a survey that Demand Metric performed on behalf of Vidyard in fall 2015, 69% of marketers intend to increase their spend on video this year, while 80% are now dedicating in-house resources to video production.
Litt said Vidyard’s revenue tripled through 2015, and its headcount doubled, from 88 to 170. He plans to use the new funding to drive an ambitious two-year plan that will continue to triple revenue annually and grow its headcount to 300, with active sales operations in the U.K., EMA and APAC.
A big focus will be building up its customer success team to help ensure clients are getting the performance they want to see out of the platform.
Vidyard’s grander vision is to expand video beyond marketing into sales, events, internal communications and other business use cases. Litt said the strategy is to leverage general enthusiasm for video to “to really make video a ubiquitous communication medium across the company” for enterprise businesses. He sees video as having the potential to overhaul the way companies operate, from IT support videos to remote workplace conferences.
Litt intends to accomplish this through tailored solutions for different use categories, much like Salesforce’s different versions of its customer success platform targeted at marketing, sales, customer service and HR departments. Vidyard recently released one such solution focused on corporate events, which includes production and distribution of invitational videos, livestream coverage of the event for offsite clients, and creating a library of clips for use in future sales and marketing videos. Promotional event videos make use of Vidyard’s recently acquired technology for dynamic personalization, so that the client’s name and details can be included in each video invite that gets sent.
Vidyard’s wide-reaching vision of applying video to every aspect of a business was a big selling point for Battery Ventures, according to general partner Michael Brown. “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,” Brown said in a statement. “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.”
Vidyard is currently a contender for Marketing’s 2015 Tech Player of the Year Award, which will be announced on Feb. 4 at our Best of the Year gala. You can read more about Vidyard in their Tech Player shortlist profile.
