Instructional video site 5min, based in NYC and Israel, has raised an additional $7.5 million in a round led by Globespan Capital Partners and joined by previous investor Spark Capital, reports Israeli business news site Globes. This brings the total of capital invested in the startup, founded in 2006, to a healthy $12.8 million.
Its most recent financing round was $5 million from Spark back in November 2007, following a painful $300,000 angel round (at least it was painful for the startup’s founders) which we talked about a bit in the post covering the announcement of their first VC round.
5min is in essence a syndication platform for instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos, both professionally produced and user-generated. The service’s video library boasts tens of thousands of videos across a variety of categories (e.g. Pets), submitted by media companies and independent producers from around the world. The site has clearly struck a chord with legions of people looking for free hands-on instructions captured on video, since 5min reportedly attracts a significant audience of between 160 and 200 million unique visitors on a monthly basis.
A big part of its vast reach comes from hundreds of publishers and advertisers who use the company’s VideoSeed product, which uses semantic technology to automatically match videos to their respective audiences. What I personally like about 5min is the rich, custom video player, dubbed SmartPlayer, and the generally high quality of the how-to videos. An example video is embedded below.
(Thanks to Ouriel Ohayon for the tip)