Metacafe is a Palo Alto, Calif. online video sharing site that filters videos based on viewer reactions and targets 18-to-34-year-olds. The company attracts roughly 14 million unique monthly U.S. visitors, according to Comscore. In late May it launched a new site dedicated to movies. Metacafe secured $5 million of an expected $6 million in an internal financing, according to an SEC filing. The financing consists of debt, options, warrants and securities. The company said it plans to use the funds to build out its editorial and sales teams, per Michelle Cox, VP of marketing communications and sales. Competitors include YouTube and Dailymotion, and the company is backed by Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, DAG Ventures and Highland Capital Partners. Metacafe is a short-form online video platform focused on audience-driven programming and short-form entertainment. The site attracts over 25 million unique views per month. Its Producer Rewards program gives creators $5 per 1,000 views once a video reaches a 20,000-view minimum. The company positions itself as delivering an entertainment experience rather than simple video hosting. With the new funding, Metacafe plans to support continuous operations and further develop the Producer Rewards program. Metacafe is privately headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., with offices in Tel Aviv and New York City. MetaCafe is an Israel-based video-sharing service that uses a filtering algorithm and a desktop client to prescreen and curate a small number of high-quality videos. The platform approves roughly two dozen new videos each day, and those curated clips draw about 20 million unique visitors per week. Founded in 2004, the company emphasizes a tightly curated content model instead of a broad user-uploaded stream. MetaCafe announced $15 million in new funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners and had previously received $5 million from Benchmark. The company will use the new funding to ramp up infrastructure and open a San Francisco office.

Total raised

$50M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Debt Financing

Latest activity

Jun 2010