Video creator SundaySky raises $9 million

Developer of platform for dynamically generating video from Web content picks up Series B round

SundaySky, developer of a platform that automatically generates videos based on Web content, secured a $9 million Series B funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) with follow-on investments from Carmel Ventures and Globespan Capital Partners. NVP partner Dror Nahumi will join SundaySky’s board of directors.

The New York City startup has raised $17 million to date.

Founded in 2006 by Shmulik Weller and Yaniv Axen, SundaySky enables clients to quickly and easily create and distribute automatically-generated videos, based on templates and provided Web content.

If you’re as curious as I was, you’ll want to head over to the SundaySky Deployment Center, where the company has linked to some of its finished products. One of the videos advertises a History Channel DVD box set on sale, for example, while another shows off a home for a real estate company. SundaySky’s platform could clearly be applied to many areas.

"SundaySky has seen significant customer adoption in the past few months with extremely positive performance results across its deployments," said Weller, CEO of SundaySky. "We are confident that the addition of a top-tier firm such as Norwest Venture Partners to our already strong list of backers will allow us to capitalize on our early successes and help us make automated video ubiquitous across the Web."

As new board member Nahumi notes in a statement, video content has repeatedly shown itself to be a big driver of higher engagement. But it may not be entirely fair to apply that fact here, however.

Everything we know about videos boosting customer engagement with a site or product, we only know in terms of videos produced the standard way--by a human being. Whether a dynamically-created video can replicate the same high engagement results as a manually-produced video remains to be proven, but I can’t imagine they would drive equal engagement. In spite of that, maybe any video is better than no video at all and, of course, as the technology improves, the quality of SundaySky’s videos wiil likewise improve.

SundaySky will use its newest investment to drive sales and scale operations.