Jivox, which bills itself as a self-service online video advertising platform for small businesses, has raised $2.7 million in a seed round of financing led by venture firm Opus Capital.
The San Mateo, California, startup offers tools to create online video ads—including templates and a library of still images, video clips and music—and then target customers through a network of web publishers.
Jivox’s “do-it-yourself” business model aims to capitalize on the growing popularity of online video, which is widely seen as the next frontier for advertising campaigns.
There's nothing startling about a startup entering the online video space. Dozens of companies are working on technology to offer more targeted online advertising, new online video players and fresh ways of aggregating videos from different sources.
Where Jivox gets interesting is its promise of driving down the relatively high production cost of video ads—compared with online banner ads, for instance—while making the technology to create those ads more accessible.
This will be especially popular to small businesses with limited resources, and Jivox makes no bones that they are its target customers.
One pitfall could be Jivox’s ability to build a large enough network for these do-it-yourselfers to find appropriate web sites for their ads. A local furniture store, for example, will want web sites in the network that attract the eyeballs of its customer base.
If the startup fails at that, businesses might still want to build their online videos with Jivox tools, but then look elsewhere to publish them.
Jivox was founded by Diaz Nesamoney, who also founded Celequest and Informatica—the latter going public in 1999. Celequest was acquired by Cognos Corp. of Ottawa, Canada.