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Getty Images leads $16M investment in Promo.com, a social video template tool
The social video tool Promo.com just raised $16 million in a Series B round led by Getty Images, the company synonymous with stock imagery.
Brands, creators or whoever else might need some quick and dirty video content can search Promo.com for what they need, just like they would use a stock photography service. Getty offers its own library of stock videos as well, but Promo.com provides both the video clips and the tools for non-editors to craft a basic edit with a little bit of customization.
Brands can select an existing professional video clip from a library, plug in their own message and add a logo or custom audio. All that’s left is downloading the customized video and whisking it off to their social channels.
Mizrahi-Tefahot Bank, one of the largest banks in Israel, also participated in the Series B round through debt financing. Promo.com’s existing “strategic partnership” with Getty Images will deepen as part of the deal, giving the former company access to the latter’s expansive existing pool of video clips.
Image Credits: Screenshot/Promo.com
Of course, Promo.com isn’t the only show in town. Video creation platform Biteable raised $7 million of its own in December, and similarly allows companies to make bright, bite-sized video content for social. The super streamlined graphic design platform Canva also supports video editing with its own library of stock images. Vimeo offers its own video template service too, known as Vimeo Create, which grew out of the company’s acquisition of the AI-powered video editor Magisto.
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Vimeo’s new app helps small businesses create professional social videos
Vimeo signaled last year its plans to move further into the social video creation and editing space with its acquisition of short-form video editor Magisto. Today, the company is unveiling the results of its work in the months following the deal’s close with the debut of Vimeo Create. The new app includes a set of video creation tools aimed at small businesses and marketers looking to tell their stories using social video, but who lack the resources, time or budget to invest in video production at the scale they need to compete.
With Vimeo Create, available on both the desktop and as an app, businesses choose from pre-made, professionally designed video templates that can be customized to meet their needs. More advanced users could opt to start a new video from scratch, as an alternative.
The app includes a library of stock content to add to videos, including millions of HD video clips, photos and commercially licensed music tracks available for no extra fee, Vimeo says. Businesses also can customize their videos by selecting the colors, fonts, layouts, logos, text captions and calls-to-action they want to use.
The app then leverages AI-powered technology to turn the clips, photos, music and text into a high-quality social video in minutes.
Vimeo Create also simplifies the process of designing videos for different social platforms, where aspect ratios (e.g. square, vertical, horizontal) and format requirements vary. After the video is finalized, users are able to publish across the web — including to Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn — as a part of the Vimeo Create workflow.
The move into social video creation is part of Vimeo’s larger strategy of becoming a one-stop shop for companies and individuals who publish videos online. The company has long since abandoned its plans to be a YouTube competitor, instead seeing the potential in the other side of the video market. Today, Vimeo makes money by offering tools and services to video creators both large and small. It has launched tools for uploading and live streaming across social sites and updated its mobile app to include more features previously available only to desktop users, among other things.
Vimeo’s decision to prioritize social video resulted from its own research. The company found that only 22% of small business owners felt they were using enough video. The businesses complained that issues around time, cost and complexity were keeping them from going further. Nearly all (96%) of small business owners said they would create more video if all those friction points were removed.
The service was built using parts of Magisto’s backend and its AI, but the overall app, feature set, content, user interface and integration into Vimeo’s tools were built from the ground up, the company says.
The company hopes Vimeo Create will help it to grow its subscription revenue, as the service is offered as a part of Vimeo’s Pro, Business and Premium membership plans, instead of as a standalone paid or freemium app.
“Video is the most impactful medium we have today for human expression at scale, and businesses
need an online video strategy to reach their customers. But the research is clear: small business owners
and entrepreneurs don’t have the tools, time or budgets to make videos at the volume and quality
needed to compete,” said Vimeo CEO Anjali Sud, in a statement about the launch. “Vimeo Create levels the playing field. It’s a radically simple tool that shortens the distance from idea to execution, so more businesses can have a successful video strategy.”
Vimeo isn’t alone in addressing the social video needs of small businesses. Last fall, Facetune maker Lightricks launched a full suite of apps for small businesses to use for their social media marketing campaigns. There also are dozens of tools for video editing on the market, including those from incumbents, like Adobe and Apple, as well as from others like Magisto, Canva, PicsArt and many more that offer features craved by small business owners like templates, easy editing tools, access to stock content and support for one-click multi-platform publishing, among other things.
Vimeo first launched Vimeo Create into beta back in January, but today it’s available to all across web, iOS and Android.
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Meme editor Kapwing grows 10X, raises $11M
Kapwing is a laymen’s Adobe Creative Suite built for what people actually do on the internet: make memes and remix media. Need to resize a video? Add text or subtitles to a video? Trim or crop or loop or frame or rotate or soundtrack or… then you need Kapwing. The free web and mobile tool is built for everyone, not just designers. No software download or tutorials to slog through. Just efficient creativity.
In a year since coming out of stealth with 100,000 users, Kapwing has grown 10X, to more than 1 million. Now it going pro, building out its $20/month collaboration tools for social media managers and scrappy teams. But it won’t forget its roots with teens, so it has dropped its pay-$6-to-remove-watermarks tier while keeping its core features free.
Eager to capitalize on the meme and mobile content business, CRV has just led an $11 million Series A round for Kapwing. It’s joined by follow-on cash from Village Global, Sinai and Shasta Ventures, plus new investors Jane VC, Harry Stebbings, Vector and the Xoogler Syndicate. CRV partners “the venture twins” Justine and Olivia Moore actually met Kapwing co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven while they all worked at The Stanford Daily newspaper in 2012.
Need to edit a meme or video? Kapwing has all the resizing, GIF, & subtitle tools you need https://t.co/FXDjShlUTq pic.twitter.com/1fEHxGoboz
— Josh Constine (@JoshConstine) September 24, 2019
“As a team, we love memes. We talk about internet fads almost every day at lunch and pay close attention to digital media trends,” says Enthoven, who started the company with fellow Googler Eric Lu. “One of our cultural tenets is to respect the importance of design, art and culture in the world, and another one is to not take ourselves too seriously.” But it is taking on serious clients.
As Kapwing’s toolset has grown, it has seen paying customers coming from Amazon, Sony, Netflix and Spotify. Now only 13% of what’s made with it are traditional text-plus-media memes. “Kapwing will always be designed for creators first: the students, artists, influencers, entrepreneurs, etc. who define and spread culture,” says Enthoven. “But we make money from the creative professionals, marketers, media teams and office workers who need to create content for work.”
That’s why in addition to plenty of templates for employing the latest trending memes, Kapwing now helps Pro subscribers with permanent hosting, saving throughout the creation process and re-editing after export. Eventually it plans to sell enterprise licenses to let whole companies use Kapwing.
Copycats are trying to chip away at its business, but Kapwing will use its new funding to keep up a breakneck pace of development. Pronounced “Ka-Pwing,” like a bullet ricochet, it’s trying to stay ahead of Imgflip, ILoveIMG, Imgur’s on-site tool and more robust apps like Canva.
If you’ve ever been stuck with a landscape video that won’t fit in an Instagram Story, a bunch of clips you want to stitch together or the need to subtitle something for accessibility, you’ll know the frustration of lacking a purpose-built tool. And if you’re on mobile, there are even fewer options. Unlike some software suites you have to install on a desktop, Kapwing works right from a browser.
” ‘Memes’ is such a broad category of media nowadays. It could refer to a compilation like the political singalong videos, animations like Shooting Star memes or a change in music like the AOC Dancing memes,” Enthoven explains. “Although they used to be edgy, memes have become more mainstream . . . Memes popularized new types of multimedia formats and made raw, authentic footage more acceptable on social media.”
As communication continues to shift from text to visual media, design can’t only be the domain of designers. Kapwing empowers anyone to storytell and entertain, whether out of whimsy or professional necessity. If big-name creative software from Adobe or Apple don’t simplify and offer easy paths through common use cases, they’ll see themselves usurped by the tools of the people.
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Kapwing is Adobe for the meme generation
Need to resize a video for IGTV? Add subtitles for Twitter? Throw in sound effects for YouTube? Or collage it with other clips for the Instagram feed? Kapwing lets you do all that and more for free from a mobile browser or website. This scrappy new startup is building the vertical video era’s creative suite full of editing tools for every occasion.
Pronounced “Ka-pwing,” like the sound of a ricocheted bullet, the company was founded by two former Google Image Search staffers. Now after six months of quiet bootstrapping, it’s announcing a $1.7 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins.
Kapwing hopes to rapidly adapt to shifting memescape and its fragmented media formats, seizing on opportunities like creators needing to turn their long-form landscape videos vertical for Instagram’s recently launched IGTV. The free version slaps a Kapwing.com watermark on all its exports for virality, but users can pay $20 a month to remove it.
While sites like Imgur and Imgflip offer lightweight tools for static memes and GIFs, “the tools and community for doing that for video are kinda inaccessible,” says co-founder and CEO Julia Enthoven. “You have something you install on your computer with fancy hardware. You should able to create and riff off of people,” even if you just have your phone, she tells me. Indeed, 100,000 users are already getting crafty with Kapwing.
“We want to make these really relevant trending formats so anyone can jump in,” Enthoven declares. “Down the line, we want to make a destination for consuming that content.”
Kapwing co-founders Eric Lu and Julia Enthoven
Enthoven and Eric Lu both worked at Google Image Search in the lauded Associate Product Manager (APM) program that’s minted many future founders for companies like Quip, Asana and Polyvore. But after two years, they noticed a big gap in the creative ecosystem. Enthoven explains that “The idea came from using outdated tools for making the types of videos people want to make for social media — short-form, snackable video you record with your phone. It’s so difficult to make those kinds of videos in today’s editors.”
So the pair of 25-year-olds left in September to start Kapwing. They named it after their favorite sound effect from the Calvin & Hobbes comics when the make-believe tiger would deflect toy gunshots from his best pal. “It’s an onomatopoeia, and that’s sort of cool because video is all about movement and sound.”
After starting with a meme editor for slapping text above and below images, Kapwing saw a sudden growth spurt as creators raced to convert landscape videos for vertical IGTV. Now it has a wide range of tools, with more planned.
The current selection includes:
- Meme Maker
- Subtitles
- Multi-Video Montage Maker
- Video Collage
- Video Filters
- Image To Video Converter
- Add Overlaid Text To Video
- Add Music To Video With MP3 Uploads
- Resize Video
- Reverse Video
- Loop Video
- Trim Video
- Mute Video
- Stop Motion Maker
- Sound Effects Maker
Kapwing definitely has some annoying shortcomings. There’s an 80mb limit on uploads, so don’t expect to be messing with much 4K videos or especially long clips. You can’t subtitle a GIF, and the meme maker flipped vertical photos sideways without warning. It also lacks some of the slick tools that Snapchat has developed, like a magic eraser for Photoshopping stuff out and a background changer, or the automatic themed video editing found in products like Google Photos.
The No. 1 thing it needs is a selective cropping tool. Instead of letting you manually move the vertical frame around inside a landscape video so you always catch the action, it just grabs the center. That left me staring at blank space between myself and an interview subject when I uploaded this burger robot startup video. It’s something apps like RotateNFlip and Flixup already offer. Hopefully the funding that also comes from Shasta, Shrug Capital, Sinai, Village Global, and ZhenFund will let it tackle some of these troubles.
Beyond meme-loving teens and semi-pro creators, Kapwing has found an audience amongst school teachers. The simplicity and onscreen instructions make it well-suited for young students, and it works on Chromebooks because there’s no need to download software.
The paid version has found some traction with content marketers and sponsored creators who don’t want a distracting watermark included. That business model is always in danger of encroachment from free tools, though, so Kapwing hopes to also become a place to view the meme content it exports. That network model is more defensible if it gains a big enough audience, and could be monetized with ads. Though it will put it in competition with Imgur, Reddit and the big dogs like Instagram.
“We aspire to become a hub for consumption,” Enthoven concluded. “Consume, get an idea, and share with each other.”
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