$30m for video portal Metacafe
Eight figure funding rounds for net video companies are starting to become frighteningly familiar. Joining Joost, Brightcove, and Veoh, Palo Alto based Metacafe has become the latest winner of the high-valuation funding lottery.
It was announced today that the company closed a $30m 3rd Round of financing. The deal was led by Highland Capital Partners and DAG Ventures. Previous investors Accel and Benchmark also participated (Accel has also invested in Brightcove). The cumulative investment in the video portal now exceeds $50m.
With a reported 25m unique visitors in June (comScore) and more than 400 million videos displayed per month, the company is solidly positioned as a top ten video portal though its well behind leaders YouTube, MySpace and offerings from AOL, Yahoo and MSN.
Richard De Silva, a partner at Highland Capital believes the company is poised for growth and offers a better media service than rival YouTube.
“[Metacafe]” he said, “[is] a place where advertisers can safely buy their advertising, and where consumers can consume media in a more conventional way, by going to the home page to discover what the community finds interesting. YouTube has a billion pages of people sharing clips with one another.”
The money from the financing will be used to expand global operations. Other terms or planned uses were not disclosed.
Richard de Silva of Highland Capital Partners and Tom Goodrich of DAG Ventures will join the Metacafe board of directors. Company co-founder Arik Czesniak will reportedly step back from day to day operations but will remain on the company’s board of directors.
