Automatic video editing startup Magisto grabbed yet another major investor today: massive Russian email and web portal Mail.ru Group.
Magisto’s service lets you create a professional-looking one-minute movie by uploading 10 minutes of rough video footage, five photos, and an audio track. More recently, the company debuted an update allowing you to guide all that raw media to help craft a more personal movie. The entire process takes up to seven minutes to complete, which is much faster than editing it manually for the majority of people.
The startup’s last funding round came from Sandisk and Qualcomm and led to Magisto’s technology being integrated into both high-end digital cameras and memory cards. Those integrations have helped the company double the number of registered users since September to 20 million. (It’s worth noting that registered users aren’t the same as active users, which Magisto hasn’t disclosed.) Magisto said it’s also now seeing users creating 3.5 million Magisto-edited videos per month.
But the latest round, a $2 million investment from Mail.ru, might present an even greater opportunity for Magisto to grow interest among consumers.
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Along with the funding, Magisto announced that its tech will be integrated into Mail.ru-owned social network Odnoklassniki. Initially, this might not seem like a big deal because most people (in the US anyway) haven’t heard of Odnoklassniki (and probably couldn’t pronounce it — g’head and try; no one will hear you, probably). However, it’s actually the largest social network in Russia, with 33 million unique visitors per day. That means there’s a huge opportunity for Magisto to pull in new users.
Founded in 2011, the New York-based startup has raised a total of $20.5 million in funding to date.
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