AnyClip Media, which helps studios like Universal Studios and Warner Brothers distribute video content, has raised $21 million to beef up its product road map.
AnyClip will also hire about 100 people globally this year to support growth in Europe and Asia. It also intends to examine non-organic growth opportunities for companies that fit its platform and services.
Backed by private investors like iHeartMedia CEO Bob Pittman and Sony CEO Mickey Schulhof, the latest funding round was led by Ervington Investments, with participation from existing investor Jerusalem Venture Partners.
AnyClip was founded in 2013 as a content marketing platform for production houses to manage their video archives and track the life cycle of their video content.
AnyClip doesn’t classify its technology as a sell-side or buy-side platform, but Oren Nauman, president and CEO of AnyClip, said it complements those tools.
Similar to the Vivendi-backed Dailymotion, AnyClip has video search engine capabilities, but also offers brands and publishers ad-targeting tools. It layers in a technology called TripleMatch, which crawls video content and determines what attributes are resonating with viewers.
“We began as a machine-learning platform for studios that extracted metadata from videos to determine what content was relevant and drove engagement,” said Nauman. “We used our technology to tell studios where audiences were receptive to their content, and moved further into monetization to run ads next to the video content itself.”
AnyClip banks about 40 million-80 million uniques, according to comScore, with an estimated 3 billion-5 billion video views a month. The reason, Nauman claims, is because AnyClip doubles up as a database of trailers and film clips for consumers with a publisher network of 200,000 sites, and as an enterprise video asset-management and monetization platform.
Because AnyClip originated as a platform that ensured copyrighted content showed up in appropriate places, Nauman claimed viewability has been a big factor in product development.
In 2014, AnyClip rolled out a SafePlay widget to automatically gauge risk based on the number of iFrames that sit between an impression and a site. Numerous iFrames can potentially indicate fraud, said Nauman.
It also has plans to roll out a platform in the fall to help brands and publishers discover and monetize over-the-top audiences.
“Mobile and OTT is the focus of our activities because we see tremendous growth, especially when you go abroad to Asia where people are mostly on mobile,” Nauman said.
For this reason, Nauman doesn’t see the rapid consolidation of US-based video platforms as an indicator the industry has reached full maturation. “You see a lot of Chinese, Australian and European countries building out video stacks,” he said. “More companies we hadn’t thought of as customers are becoming customers.”
