Video platform Vidyard’s CEO had to talk biz on his wedding day to get this $18M

Business video platform Vidyard CEO Michael Litt must have a very understanding wife.

Litt, after trying without success for more than two years to score funding from investment firm Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), took a call from a BVP partner on his wedding day in August.

“I was at home getting ready [for the wedding] when we had the call,” Litt recalled via email for VentureBeat. “As of that conversation, the game was on,” he said.

He followed up on that call by eventually closing the deal with BVP.

“Our [month over month] growth over the past 16 months has been incredible,” Litt said, adding that “it’s tough for an investor to ignore that kind of growth.”

But “the broader concern was around the market opportunity as a whole,” he said. “We’re not displacing an 800 pound gorilla with a $20 billion market cap. We’re a new technology in a market we’ve defined.”

BVP needed to be shown the “multibillion-dollar exit opportunity to provide their target returns,” Litt said.

Vidyard’s platform hosts business video content for distribution to websites, social channels, and YouTube. It identifies, tracks, and makes efforts to engage visitors based on their individual viewing history — including how long they watch a video and which parts they skip.

That data, along with such info as which videos generate the most revenue, is made available to marketing automation and CRM systems to improve lead scoring and the like. Recently introduced tools enable custom-branded video channels and the creation of custom videos.

Given the company’s growth, the new, hard-earned funding “isn’t survival money,” Litt told us. “This is growth money.”

It will be used to hire new employees, expand research and development, and enhance features through additional enterprise integrations, improved video analytics, and more ways to create content. The company had raised $7.65 million in previous Series A and seed rounds.

While there are a number of online video platforms that are designed to bring video to the Net in the context of advertising, such as Brightcove and Ooyala, Litt said that paid media is not Vidyard’s realm.

“We’re the only video platform to exclusively focus on enabling [the] sales and marketing process within an organization,” he said.

The company is based in the Kitchener-Waterloo area of Ontario, a hotbed of tech companies like BlackBerry and Unitron and home to the University of Waterloo.

In addition to lead funder BVP, other funders in this round included existing investors iNovia Capital, OMERS Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and SoftTech VC.