Formerly known as MovieClips.com, ZEFR announced today a $30 million funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners to expand the reach of the ZEFR video software platform. IVP, a late-stage venture capital and private equity firm that has $4 billion of committed capital, has invested in high-growth companies such as Twitter, Zynga, TiVo, LivingSocial, DropBox, Snapchat, Shazam - and now ZEFR.
James Chmielinski, technical recruitment lead, had this to say about IVP's investment: “IVP’s investment attests to the caliber of our people, culture, and technology. We are thrilled that they are boarding the ZEFR rocket ship!”
In the past few years few companies have done as much to assist content owners and brands on YouTube than ZEFR. ZEFR has been a pioneer in monetizing online video content and has developed an end-to-end solution for customers in all industries. The ZEFR platform helps identify user-submitted videos on YouTube in real-time to make money off of them. With that technology ZEFR was able to lock clients like Saturday Night Live, Sony Music, Real Madrid, Universal Pictures and more.
With this funding, ZEFR hopes to grow its sales and marketing teams in hopes of acquiring more clients across different industries and its engineering team to further improve existing products Brand ID, Ad ID and Channel ID. As part of the investment, IVP general partner David Phelps will join ZEFR’s board of directors. Phelps led IVP’s efforts in investing in SnapChat and PopSugar. The firm is not a newcomer in investing in media companies as IVP was an early backer of TiVo. This $30 million dollar round now brings ZEFR’s total amount raised to about $53 million.
This is an exciting time for ZEFR as they are bringing on board a California-based investor that had previously invested in media, business analytics and social software to help grow its existing business. With this funding round ZEFR is making moves to conquer online video.
