Israeli mobile video platform secures $2 million from Mail.ru Group

Magisto, an Israeli cloud-based mobile video platform, announced on Friday a $2 million investment from Mail.Ru Group, the LSE-listed Russian Internet giant. The investment is designed to fuel further growth and customer acquisition.

In addition, Magisto has integrated its offering into Odnoklassniki.ru, a subsidiary of Mail.Ru Group and the second largest social network in Russia with 33 million daily unique visitors.

Magisto presents itself as a mobile technology service for creating and sharing beautiful quality personal movies. “The platform automatically selects the most compelling moments from ordinary videos and photos and, like an expert video editor, weaves them together to convey a story with customized styles and music,” claims the company.

Last fall, Magisto received another strategic investment from Qualcomm Ventures and SanDisk Ventures. Just earlier this month, Magisto unveiled CamCrew, a new technology for mobile devices on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset that automates even more of the video-making process.

The Israeli company also announced that it has surpassed 20 million registered users, doubling its registered users since September 2013. Magisto, which is now acquiring two million users per month, claims to be the highest-rated video creation app in the Google Play and iOS App Stores.

“As we continue to look beyond the Russian market and think more globally, Magisto perfectly maps to that innovation-focused vision. Their growth has been impressive and we expect Odnoklassniki users to fall in love with it as millions already have,” said Mor Yegerman, Head of International M&A at Mail.Ru Group.

So far the Mail.ru Group has not developed significantly beyond Russia, putting aside the popularity of its webmail service Mail.ru and of Odnoklassniki in several Russian-speaking countries and the success of some of its games and gambling sites well beyond the former Soviet Union.

However, global expansion is important to the group in a long-term perspective, Dmitry Grishin, co-founder and CEO of the group, stated in a recent exchange with the US tech publication Venture Beat.

In November last year, Mail.ru Group launched My.com in order to develop English-language communication and entertainment applications. The subsidiary is located in the heart of Silicon Valley.

In May, the group poured $1.5 million into the Israeli visual search developer Cortica as part of a larger round.

 

Topics: Digital content & Related technologies, Finance, International, Internet, Mobile & Telecom, Mobile content, News, Startups, Venture / Private equity
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