Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More
Los Angeles-based Movieclips has done well for itself by, um, clipping movies into bite-sized clips that viewers love. But there’s a whole bigger world of content out there, and it plans to tackle it with a whole new brand and $18.5 million in new funding.
Movieclips was founded in 2009 with the idea of making memorable film moments available to fans, and helping studio partners monetize them. Since then, it has partnered with six major Hollywood studios and licensed their content to create and distribute clips from full-length movies.
Over the past few years, Movieclips has used its own clipping and tagging technology to look for popular moments create more than 25,000 clips that viewers can access on its own site, as well as its popular YouTube channel. Launched just ten months ago, it’s quickly shot up the comScore YouTube charts, and Movieclips now sees more than 600 million monthly views, with more than 3 billion total views since being founded.
With that challenge completed, the company plans to extend beyond the movie business, and also add content in the TV, music, and sports categories. To do so, it’s rebranding as Zefr, and will be adding clips from these new categories as well.
It’s also picked up new funding along the way. It’s raised $18.5 million in a Series C financing round led by U.S. Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors MK Capital, Shasta Ventures, SoftTech VC, First Round Capital, Richmond Park Partners, and Machinima CEO Allen DeBevoise. Along with the infusion of new cash, John Hadl of U.S. Venture Partners will join the board.
The company says the funding will be used to “drive the company’s rapid growth in its new music, sports and television verticals, expand internationally and invest in new technology.” I’ve reached out to the founders, who are generally good guys, and will update the post with more when I hear back.
Launched in December 2009, MOVIECLIPS.com is an online video destination offering audiences the largest and most diverse collection of movie scenes. MOVIECLIPS.com allows fans to find, watch and share more than 12,000 movie clips from the libraries of most major Hollywood studios. Each clip is tagged with up to 1,000 pieces of data (dialogue, actor, director, action, mood, etc) to make the most searchable collection of movie scenes on the web.
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