Bits and Pieces of Funding for Online Video

Millions of dollars keep getting deposited into the bank accounts of video startups. Today didn’t bring any huge deals, but there were a few worth noting:

Dragonfly, a video platform company focused on high-definition, has raised $3 million in funding from angels including former football star Joe Theismann. CEO Guy Nouri’s bio says he sold a previous effort called VideoSite to GTECH back in the ’90s. Customers include Adweek. I have to say, the corporate site is way too bulky and flashy for my taste.

Magnify.net raised not a whole lot from a whole lot of investors: $1 million from Next Stage Capital, New York Angels, Rose Tech Ventures, Active Angel Investors, Chris Anderson, Ogden Capital and Gideon Gartner. It had raised $1.2 million about a year ago. Magnify helps users curate other peoples’ videos. We spoke to WeShow yesterday, and they’re expanding in this direction, too. That company is also currently trying to raise $6 million.

Crunchyroll, an anime and manga video aggregator, raised $4.05 million in Series A funding led by David Siminoff at Venrock, according to peHUB. Deep Jive Interests and others complain that the site was built on copyrighted content. Last week the company took down the advertising from its site and asked users for donations. The company is founded and funded by former HotorNot employees.

Over on the fund side, NBC Universal quadrupled its Peacock Equity fund, taking it to $1 billion from $250 million. Jessica Schell, VP of digital media strategy and investments at NBC U, said at the Harvard conference I attended yesterday that her group “just got the go-ahead to increase to a billion [dollars], and will be doing more larger investments.”

Also, peHUB reports that a Silicon Valley venture firm is teaming with talent agency William Morris “for a new seed-stage digital media/entertainment fund,” but doesn’t name names. So it seems the funding isn’t drying up any time soon.

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