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Q&A with CEO Shmulik Weller: “SundaySky Closes $20M Financing Round” [VIDEO]

Rachel Eisenhauer October 15, 2013
Q&A with CEO Shmulik Weller: “SundaySky Closes $20M Financing Round” [VIDEO]

We’re celebrating a major milestone in the SundaySky offices today: We are thrilled to announce we have raised $20 million in our series C funding round! This round, led by new investor Comcast Ventures and joined by Liberty Global Ventures, Vintage Ventures, and our existing investors, Carmel Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, brings SundaySky’s total capital invested to date to almost $40 million.

Before diving into all the details, watch our co-founder and CEO Shmulik Weller’s official announcement below, followed by a Q&A with him on the exciting news and what it means for our customers, our team and the smart video category.

Q: Thanks for such an exciting announcement today, Shmulik! Can you give us a brief history of SundaySky’s fundraising timeline to date, and how this round compares to previous ones?

Indeed, today is a thrilling day for the whole SundaySky family: employees, customers, partners and investors! This was a very exciting round for us, as it comes at a key moment in our growth. We doubled in size to 100+ employees in the last 12 months, tripled revenues in 2012 and expect to close out 2013 at the same growth rate.

We secured our first institutional round of $8M from Carmel and Globespan in 2006, and three years ago this month Norwest joined our investors and led our series B round, securing $9M. This third round is a true milestone in both size and strength, as it highlights our success in establishing and leading the smart video category.

Q: What do you think this says about the state of the smart video category?

Today is an exciting time in digital video, as evidenced by recent moves such as AOL’s Adap.tv acquisition and RocketFuel’s soaring IPO, as well as funding announcements from fellow personalized video providers Idomoo and Eyeview. What’s even more exciting is the CMO-CIO convergence (Gartner says CMOs will spend more on IT than the CIO by 2017) and the changing landscape of marketing platforms. Video, big data and customer experience are now strategic to the CMO suite, which is looking holistically at digital engagement throughout the customer lifecycle and how their technology investments can support this. Personalized video is becoming recognized as a key innovation in this regard.

Q: What does this fundraising news mean for our customers? What about for the SundaySky team?

Before I get into how these funds will benefit our customers and employees, I first want to point out the tremendous contributions from both of these groups thus far. Our employees are the reason we’ve been able to deliver more than 140 million SmartVideos to date on behalf of our customers, who believe in the power of SmartVideo and have helped us in proving the incremental business value it delivers. Without either of these two groups, this round would never have come to fruition, so thank you to all!

My excitement for this round can only be matched by how we’ll put the funds to work. We are looking forward to new product enhancements that will maximize our customers’ investments in our platform, as well as deeper levels of customer service and support as we continue to scale our account management and support teams. Additionally, we’ll accelerate the growth and scale of SundaySky with the addition of go-to-market capacity to address the vast personalized video market in existing and new geographies. Finally, we will continue to widen our already unbridgeable competitive gap with R&D efforts focused on new product innovation and enhancements that will:

  1. Ensure our customers achieve maximum SmartVideo view volume and value by taking advantage of big data and advances in our algorithms;
  2. Further streamline SmartVideo Advertising creation, configuration and optimization; and
  3. Give customers more flexibility and control over their SmartVideo programs as the scale to span multiple acquisition and engagement touch points.

Thanks Shmulik! The SundaySky team would like to thank all of our investors for believing in our vision for SmartVideo as the paradigm for consumer communication and for trusting us to build something great.

You can read the official press release here, and below are some offices photos of us celebrating the news!

SundaySky Series C $20M