Vidyard adds OMERS Ventures to its list of all-star investors

Two years after developing Vidyard in Waterloo as a response to a perceived lack of integrated analytics in cross-platform publishing, its founders can celebrate another win.

The company has secured $6.04 million in Series A funding, led by OMERS Ventures, with help from iNovia Capital and SofTech VC, and a personal contribution from Jill Rowley of Eloqua.

OMERS Ventures Managing Director, Derek Smyth, says Vidyard could become a vital tool in a market that is spreading in all directions.

“From February 2011 to February 2012, the number of videos watched by Americans increased 660%. During the same period, the number of hours of online video watched by an average user increased by 60% to 21.8 hours per month. Vidyard’s simple brilliance addresses a clear and significant need in a rapidly growing market. Michael Litt and Devon Galloway, Vidyard’s founders, took the initiative to develop a valuable and easy-to-use solution for a challenge they faced every day in their own businesses. Their deep domain expertise and applied innovation is what attracted OMERS Ventures to make this investment”.

Vidyard began as a fourth year design project for its founders Michael Litt, Devon Galloway and Edward Wu. The trio launched as a company in August of 2011 and quickly received funding from an all-star roster of investors, including YouTube Co-founder Jawed Karim, famed California incubator Y Combinator, and GMail creator Paul Buchheit.

Vidyard finds itself at the center of several converging trends. The boom in online video has paralleled the fall in cost of video equipment, while quality and broadband capacity have steadily improved. Smartphones and tablets, meanwhile, have become viable secondary viewing screens. The service helps marketers wading into these uncharted waters with much needed syndication and evaluation tools.

While Coca-Cola recently sent a chill through the nascent social media guru community by releasing a report that suggested “online buzz has no measurable impact on short term sales,” Vidyard’s focus is on providing actionable data to its users.

The proliferation of online video and technological improvement does nothing to narrow the ratio of good to bad video, with ample increases in the quantity of both. Vidyard, however, promises to separate the good from the pack through measurable analytics.