Movement Ventures raises $5.5M to BuzzFeedify the Web

Touting Boombox, a creative suite for polls and quizzes, Utah-based firm picks up its Series A round

More polls! More quizzes!

Movement Ventures, a collective of entrepreneurs that builds interactive content publishing and marketing tools, today announced a $5.5 million Series A funding round led by Pelion Venture Partners with backing from Kickstart Seed Fund, Peterson Partners, and various angel investors including Jeremy Andrus (former CEO at Skullcandy) and Aaron Skonnard (President and CEO at Pluralsight).

Back in September 2014, Movement Ventures raised $2 million in seed funding in a round led by Kickstart Seed Fund, an early-stage venture capital firms that invests in companies in its own backyard: Utah.

Based in Lehi (just south of Salt Lake City) and founded in 2013, Movement Ventures builds tools for brands and publishers to help them meet the expectations of today’s customers and online readers. Bursting with interactive content and engaging activities, social media sites (first) and then the Buzzfeeds of the world have cultivated an online audience that today thrives on being able to click through polls and quizzes while absorbing content.

But creating those polls and quizzes--and making them look good--could be time-consuming for publishers. That’s the pain point Movement Ventures tries to solve for their customers.

Launched last year, for example, Qzzr allows you to create embeddable quizzes for websites, with the ultimate goal being increased traffic or more qualified leads. Pollcaster, launched earlier this year, is like Qzzr except for polls instead of quizzes.

Then there’s Boombox, the “creative suite” that takes the ideas behind Pollcaster and Qzzr to the next level. The drag-and-drop application allows brands and publishers to build polls, quizzes and galleries, import images and videos, and customize the entire look and feel around those modules.

It’s clear this is where Movement Ventures is doubling down, as the company says its Series A funding will be used to primarily to accelerate the growth of the Boombox platform.

When I asked about pricing, Josh Little (the company's CEO and founder) told me they use “a freemium model that scales with the value you want to create.”

For example, the basic/free tier grants users access to unlimited quizzes, polls, custom themes, and analytics. Once they’ve upgraded to paid plans, which range from $1000 to tens of thousands of dollars per year, customers can reduce Boombox branding or white label their content, unlock lead generation, and access other advanced customization features.

Movement says its three core products (Boombox, Pollcaster, and Qzzr) have garnered millions of website engagements for more than 80,000 brands and publishers, including CBS, Yahoo!, LinkedIn, Time Inc., The Food Network, and Today. Though Pollcaster (launched in April 2015) has a little less than 10 percent of the regular active users of Qzzr (launched in early 2014), Little says the former is actually growing faster than the former initially did.

In the meantime, the company is moving their fourth product--LittleBit--to the backburner.