Posts for 'Wibbitz'

It’s a good day for video tech providers with Israeli roots as Wibbitz has announced a $20 million Series C funding and Connatix has raised a $15 million Series A round. The Wibbitz round was led by Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, with participation from The Weather Channel, The Associated Press, TF1 and existing investors NantMobile, lool Ventures and Horizons Ventures and brings total funding to $30.8 million. The Connatix round was led by Volition Capital.

While the companies have different value propositions, they’re both playing to the broader industry trends of enabling publishers to enrich their properties with more video, which creates more opportunities for video advertising.

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Text-to-video creation platform Wibbitz has released new research this morning indicating enthusiasm for live video as a news source. Wibbitz surveyed 1,000+ 18-65 year-olds in the U.S. about how they’re responding to live video, chatbots, wearables and virtual reality as a way to get the news, and therefore where publishers may want to invest.

Live video was the only one of the 4 technologies that engenders more positive than negative feelings as a means for getting the news (though not by much, just 30% to 25%). Wearables was the least well-suited for news, with 57% having a negative feeling, vs. 16% positive. 66% of respondents thought live video was the most useful for keeping up with the news, 4x that of wearables, which was second. 52% also thought live video is the most entertaining option for keeping up with the news, compared with 35% for VR.

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Wibbitz, an Israeli text-to-video startup, has raised an $8 million Series B round led by NantMobile, with participation by existing investors. The funds will be used to expand into the U.S. via a new New York City office, headed by CEO and co-founder Zohar Dayan, who brought me up to speed on the company yesterday.

Wibbitz uses natural language processing to quickly turn publishers' text articles into short videos. The process begins with Wibbitz's technology digesting the article via algorithms meant to emulate a human reader's behavior, identifying key people, main points and the theme, resulting in a summary of about 20% of the full article.

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