Techcrunch reports that PLY Media, an Israeli startup based in Palo Alto and Israel, has raised a first round of $6 million, led by Greylock Partners and Elron Electronic Industries, an Israeli holding company with a portfolio of over 20 Israeli startups.
According to the announcement, the deal has already been disclosed by Elron back in May:
During the first quarter Elron invested in two new companies: PLYmedia Inc., which develops and deploys an interactive video platform, offering web video sites and broadcasters a wide range of layered applications to enhance, personalize and monetize their video assets…
PLY Media’s previous round was led by angel investors including: Bill Harris (former PayPal CEO), Gordon Radley (former Lucas Film president), and Gil Elbaz, co-founder of Applied Semantics (which became Google’s AdSense).
PLY Media offers a suite of tools to enrich video content, by adding interactive layers onto flash video files. Some of the tools include: BubblePLY pop-up bubbles, text, images, clipart and subtitles can be easily added to any video, SubPLY– allows web video publishers, broadcasters and other users to add subtitles and captions in any language to any type of web video and AdPLY, which enables users to insert and manage relevant text or banner ads onto any web video, resulting in increased ROI and advertising revenues. See previous coverage on VC Cafe.
PLY Media has gotten a fair amount of traction and was most recently recognized as first place winner in a startup competition held by Microsoft and Vertex Venture Capital. The company’s founders are Ben Enosh, David Markowitz, Yoni Silberberg and Yuval Klein.
Competitors might be considered to be Innovid, another Israeli startup that enables animated layers on top of video files and potentially 5Min.com, who apart from growing its large how-to video collection is working on a video player with advanced user features.
Watch the demo of PLY Media’s technology:
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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