ScribbleLive has acquired Visually for an undisclosed price.
Toronto-based ScribbleLive was founded in 2008, starting out as a liveblogging platform and eventually growing to a broader set of tools for content marketing — namely, helping businesses promote themselves with blog posts, videos and more. ScribbleLive’s products are pretty broad, covering everything from using data to predict the types of content that will be successful to finding influencers who can give your content broader reach.
However, ScribbleLive CEO Vince Mifsud said that one of the challenges facing customers was simply, “Who’s going to create the content?” — particularly when the company is “resource constrained” and doesn’t have a big enough team to do this on its own.
That’s where Visually comes in. Like ScribbleLive, the company has evolved a bit, in this case expanding from an automated infographic tool to a marketplace where businesses can recruit freelancers to create visual content, whether that’s infographics, videos, presentations or e-books. Visually CEO Matt Cooper said Visually will continue to exist as a separate brand and marketplace, but over time, it will be “increasingly connected” with ScribbleLive’s other products.
Mifsud added that most of the Visually team will be joining ScribbleLive, minus “a few redundant functions” in areas like finance. (Since Visually is headquartered in San Francisco, it will give ScribbleLive a bigger presence in Silicon Valley.) Cooper himself will remain in charge of Visually while also taking responsibility for ScribbleLive’s content marketplace. Visually’s vice president of marketing Ural Cebeci will become VP of marketing for the combined company.
As for where the company sits in the broader content marketing landscape, Mifsud argued that most of the competition consists of “all these little point solutions.”
“The winner in the market is going to be the company that executes on the platform side with scale and size,” he said, adding, “That platform has to be powered with math and data science. That’s a key element of our differentiation as well.”
Prior to the acquisition, Visually raised about $15 million in funding from Crosslink Capital, SoftTech VC and 500 Startups. ScribbleLive, meanwhile, has raised nearly $60 million.