MovieClips gets $6M for...movie clips

The company raised $6M of a total $7M round, according to an SEC form

MovieClips, the Pandora for short-form movie clips, on Thursday filed an SEC form for $6 million in equity financing out of a total $7 million sought. The company could not be reached for comment and the investors were not disclosed.

Founded in 2009, the company has curated more than 14,000 movie clips gathered directly from the libraries of movie studios such as Twentieth Century Fox, MGM, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, and Paramount—which is not an easy process. Film studios usually restrict the clips to no more than two minutes and 13 seconds, and the clips come with additional restrictions: MovieClips can’t show any corporate logos, there are music restrictions, certain actors can’t be shown without their shirts on, and so on.

The site lets you search for clips by movie title, actor, director, types of characters, scenes, specific lines of dialogue, and even props. For example, I can type in “Clever girl,” the line from Jurassic Park when the dinosaur hunter gets attacked by the raptor (I heart Jurassic Park), and the clip will come up in the search results. Each individual clip is tagged with up to 1,000 pieces of data, including actor, director, dialogue, etc.

But the company’s inventory is not complete. The site does not have any clips from the ‘60s Jane Fonda cult classic “Barbarella,” about a promiscuous and scantily clad space-traveler who’s sent to search the galaxy to locate the evil Durand-Durand. So I requested it…because it’s hilarious.

In November, MovieClips raised $3 million in a Series A round of funding from Shasta Ventures and First Round Capital, with help from angel investors Jeff Clavier of SoftTech VC, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Jeff Kearl, Tom McInerney, and prior investor Richmond Park Partners. In all this round brings the company’s total raised to $9.15 million.