Once upon a time, seemingly everyone was creating mobile apps to help users shoot, edit, and share videos with one another. Thanks to a desire to build or invest in the “Instagram for video,” a number of new social video apps popped up and got funding last year.
One startup that was always a bit of an outlier in that race was Magisto, which had built an app that was designed to magically create interesting videos out of the videos that users had stored on their computers and phones. Now, after posting pretty incredible growth, the company has raised $13 million to take on the ambitious goal of unlocking all the world’s photos and videos and making them sharable.
The funding comes from two major strategic investors — Qualcomm Ventures and Sandisk. Existing investors Magma Venture Partner and Li Ka Shing’s Horizons Ventures also participated in the round.
Magisto has signed up more than 13 million users since being founded, pitching them on the idea of “video storytelling.” By using proprietary algorithms, the mobile and web app pieces together multiple video and photo assets and creates sharable videos and photo slideshows. They can then be shared on social networks, or with specific friends and family.
While a large amount of video is being created and stored on smartphones, there’s also a ton of photos and videos that has been shot but never makes it off a user’s SD card. Magisto CEO and co-founder Oren Boiman hopes to make all that content available to be shared.
“Not [even] 1% of this material has ever left its SD card,” he wrote by email. “If Magisto can mobilize a few percent of this huge data, internet will be entirely different and it will shift the focus onto what is what actually important to us, our life experiences, our shared memories, our stories.”
And well, what better way to do that then by mashing them up into automagically awesome videos that you’ll actually want to watch.
When you consider that Qualcomm and Sandisk make a lot of the chips and storage products where those photos and videos are kept, well then I guess the investment makes sense.
Photo Credit: jasleen_kaur via Compfight cc