Russian video sharing startup, ClipClock — which is being billed as a ‘Pinterest for video clips’ — has snagged a $2.5 million investment from VC firm Runa Capital. The startup, which was founded in January and launched its website and mobile app at the DEMO Fall 2012 Conference last month, allows users to collect their favourite video clips and share them through social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
Here’s how the startup was billed at the DEMO conference
ClipClock allows users to collect and share the best clipped video moments. This saves users time – as they no longer have to scroll through and search long videos. Instead, they can watch videos at the exact right moment(s). Clips are easily discovered through search and shared through social media
The startup said the investment will be used to support the development of “advanced functionality” in its products, and also to drive user growth via things like direct ad and sponsored stories on Facebook, “viral distribution” and signing new Facebook and YouTube partners.
In terms of product development, ClipClock said a big update to its iOS app is on the way, while it’s also starting development on Android and Windows Phone 8 apps. Marketing is another key focus for it with the new funding round — aka building a community of video sharers. “We have just started with that,” ClipClock Founder & CEO, Alex Krainov, tells TechCrunch. “We just introduced the new approach of socially created video stream based on videos from users’ Facebook news feeds and now we will start working on the content optimization, rankings.”
To date, ClipClock has attracted a $50,000 investment from Microsoft’s Seed Fund (which explains its early focus on building a WP8 app; it also hosts on Microsoft’s Azure platform) and $200,000 from Business Angels, along with Runa’s $2.5 million investment — bringing its total investment to $2.75 million.
ClipClock works over existing video services such as YouTube and Vimeo, by streaming videos from them and “enhancing” the user experience. It is also making clips available through search engine queries to drive views. Other growth strategies include using features such as user ratings, friends invitations and relevant video recommendations to boost use and views.
“ClipClock saves time and effort in finding interesting content and watching only interesting pieces of video clips, discovering video clips and sharing opinion around exact moments,” said Gaidar Magdanurov, Investment Director at Runa Capital, in a statement. “We are excited to partner with ClipClock and will put our energy into growing the user base and global expansion of the service.”