Cinemacraft offers HTML5 "videograms" that display a selection of segments from a video so viewers can click to skip to specific parts, increasing engagement. Its embed formats work as social media cards, web embeds, and as a format for ad servers and display ads. The company charges paying publishers $1 per CPM and shares ad revenue with free users when Cinemacraft inserts video ads; the CEO said the company is making revenue. Cinemacraft reports higher engagement metrics for videograms (typically 40–60% click-through rate versus a 25–40% single-frame average). Engineering is centered in Tokyo with a newly opened Mumbai office and a small team, and the company recently added a COO and plans to hire additional developers. Management intends to use the new funding to push international expansion and product development, and may pursue a Series B if it sees hyper-growth. Cinemacraft builds "Videograms," interactive HTML5 images that highlight multiple clips from a video instead of a single freeze-frame thumbnail. An algorithm selects which frames appear on a Videogram, enabling publishers to create visual summaries and increase engagement. Viewers can comment on and share individual clips, and publishers can place ads within Videograms that refresh based on the most popular frames. Cinemacraft says Videograms improve monetization and social media marketing and help retain viewers who might otherwise abandon videos within the first seconds. The company has run campaigns for clients including Fox Pictures, Sony Pictures and Capitol Records. Cinemacraft will use its latest funding to scale globally, improve its platform and expand its core team; total funding to date is $2 million. Cinemacraft is building a cloud-based interactive mobile broadcast platform that streams video and other rich media to a wide range of handsets, including low-end feature phones. The platform supports delivery over 2.5G (30–60 kbps), 3G (100–250 kbps), 4G (300+ kbps) and Wi‑Fi/broadband (400–1000 kbps) to address weak bandwidth and latency environments. Supported content types include movies, TV programs, music, games, comics and interactive video ads. The company aims to create a unified interactive media platform to overcome fragmentation in the mobile ecosystem. Management says it will use new funding to build an interactive video ad network across Japan, the US, India and Indonesia and to develop ad-supported consumer video apps. To date the company has raised a total of US$900,000.

Total raised

$5M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Feb 2015