Magisto raises $5.5 Million to Automate Video Editing

Magisto, the cloud video editing, has recently announced the end of a series B of funding which has brought the company an amount of $5.5 million. The money raised in this second round of funding are intended to be used in order to automate the painstaking editing process for the masses. This funding round has been led by Hong Kong investor Li Ka-shing’s Horizon Ventures, with the participation of Magma Venture Partners. As a matter of fact, Magma Venture Partners is the company which has previously funded Magisto, with terms which remain undisclosed.

Oren Boiman, the CEO at Magisto, stated the following: “Video editing is not just challenging — for 99 percent of people, it’s a barrier. We’re the first company to make automated video editing into an easy-to-use service. We think of Li Ka-shing’s investment as more than just venture capital. It opens doors and positions us in such a way that we could be integrated into other services.”

The services provided by Magisto are free for the moment and they are intended to automate the video editing process for the ones which have not a lot of experience in this field. This means that anybody who uses this service can submit video clips to Magisto and let the service do the cutting of the video material which generates an interesting final result. In order to do this, the services provided by Magisto scan the video clips for noteworthy action and afterwards it packages those interesting scenes with tricks such as transitions and split-screens. After the moment when the user inserts a title and a soundtrack for the video clip, the work is done and can be shared.

Oren Boiman also declared the following: “You don’t want to share a video; you want to share an event. We turn your video into something that isn’t boring.”

For the moment, the team at Magisto has only developed a service which can edit any type of video which is under two minutes. The team, as Boiman said, may be considering offering a premium version for longer clips, but this one would require a type of payment. Moreover, this premium version would also have other advantages such as the removal of the Magisto’s branding, and the allowance to download the video in order for the user to be able to share it only if he or she chooses so.

At the moment, the service is being used by 20.000 users in its closed beta that started in April. Boiman believes in the success of this idea as it will allow users to create a sort of library of personal events which, despite the fact that will not be widely shared, will cause users to come back to the site in order to access their clips quite often.

Cloud video editing seems to be one of the hottest topics this year, as there are also other companies such as WeVideo and DEMO which have recently launched and generated lots of disputes.