Streaming video platform provider Vimeo has acquired Magisto, a Mountain View-based company focused on short-form video creation, for a reported $200 million (although neither company would confirm the amount).
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In a blog published this morning, Magisto CEO and co-founder Oren Boiman announced the deal with obvious enthusiasm:
“Today we are THRILLED to announce that we’ve agreed to be acquired by Vimeo…. By combining forces with Vimeo, we will be able to offer you a more valuable all-in-one video marketing solution that goes way beyond creation to include collaboration, hosting and management, distribution, analytics, monetization, live streaming and more.”
Ten-year-old Magisto has raised nearly $23 million in venture capital over time from investors such as SanDisk Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. It has an estimated 100 million users.
Boiman came up with the idea for Magisto when he was a Ph.D. student working with Artificial Intelligence and researching the science of video vision. After editing all the videos he and his wife had taken of their newborn, Boiman realized he had spent two weeks creating a three-minute film. Thus, Magisto was founded, with the mission “to help people turn their ordinary video and photo memories into storytelling magic,” according to Boiman’s Crunchbase profile. He and his co-founder, Alex Rav-Acha, leveraged his background in AI and computer science to develop a cloud-based mobile technology that gives Magisto the ability “to automatically select the most compelling moments from videos and photos and weave them together into cohesive personal narratives.”
Magisto currently has about 75 employees with 90 percent of them being based in Israel, according to vice president of business development Uli Gal-Oz. He added that the company saw over 100 percent revenue growth in 2018, and the bulk of it came from business subscribers (versus consumer subscribers). The growth in ARR was “much higher,” Gal-Oz said, but since Magisto hasn’t completed its financials for 2018 he could not yet provide exact GAAP figures.
Founded in 2005, New York-based Vimeo has made at least four other acquisitions during its lifetime, according to its Crunchbase profile. In 2017, it acquired live video streaming platform Livestream. Currently, Vimeo is used by more than 90 million video creators in over 150 countries.
Note: This story was updated post-publication after the company got back to us.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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