Digital rights management and monetization startup Vydia this week completed its initial close of $7 million in Series A funding, which was led by Vocap Investment Partners and included participation from Newark Venture Partners.
The move brings Vocap Investment Partners managing director Vinny Olmstead onto Vydia's board of directors.
He said in a statement, "Vydia has a significant head start as the category leader in the rapidly expanding video content market. The proliferation of serious content creators coupled with the disruption driven by social media as a distribution channel has created the need for a new kind of technology solution. Vydia had the foresight to recognize and act on this opportunity and is now leading the way with a software solution that is simple and elegant for both creators and companies that manage content creators."
Vydia says it plans to use the new investment to institutionalize and ramp sales, expand product and feature sets, as well as to further expand its machine learning capabilities and integrate into additional video, audio and social platforms. The company currently boasts more than 200,000 users that use the platform to create, distribute, monetize, store, protect and measure their content.
Having so focused mostly on music and video content, Vydia now plans to expand into additional additional content verticals as well.
"Content creators are leveraging the power of video across every social platform available, however, their insights and control over their own intellectual property are limited. Vydia is empowering creators by solving this problem with a smart, universal application" said Vydia founder and CEO Roy LaManna in a statement. "We are committed to building the tools our creators around the world rely on to power and protect their content, and with this investment, we will have new resources to expand and improve our proprietary technology both for individual creators and content focused brands."
Since launching in 2013, Vydia's previous investors include Paradigm Talent Agency, S-Curve Records, QueensBridge Venture Partners, Dovi Frances, Ozone management and others.