A consortium of funds and private investors believe in Imagineer growth plans.
Imagineer Systems announced today that it has closed a £1m investment round to accelerate growth of the business.
A syndicate, led by London Seed Capital and including South East Growth Fund and Oxford Technology 4 VCT, has provided a development capital injection of more than £1m into Imagineer Systems Ltd. The round also included co-investment from members of London Business Angel Network. London Seed Capital initially invested into the company in April 2004, alongside members of London Business Angel Network, and introduced the deal to South East Growth Fund and Oxford Technology 4 VCT. Imagineer have built a successful international business through the sale of its suite of advanced software tools for professional film and video post industry. Its proprietary cutting edge image processing technologies have been used in a wide number of Hollywood blockbusters including X-Men 3, Pirates of the Caribbean II and Eight Below.
The new funding will allow the company to build on is current success by strengthening its sales, marketing and support operation, particularly in the dominant US market where an office will be established and in high growth markets such as India and China. The company will continue to broaden its innovative product portfolio targeting the commercials, broadcast and film post production markets. New distribution channels such as IPTV, mobile devices and the Internet, the globalisation of content production, growing demand for flexibility in the post production service offerings and increasing sophistication of the creative work are some of the key elements driving the need for technological innovation to enable content creators to continue to deliver ever more engaging content. This creates opportunities that the company is capturing through innovative development programmes with partners pushing the creative boundaries.
It will also develop new areas to exploit its technologies. This will include the establishment of a digital media advertising service business which will provide an end-to-end in-video advertising service to corporate clients. In-video advertising is the act of digitally placing branded products on set, as a way of exposing the product and brand to the viewer. Using proprietary technology Imagineer can manipulate existing content, for example, regionalising the branding within popular TV programmes such as Friends or upcoming high definition re-releases of films. The in-video advertising approach is attractive for several reasons. It is skip proof, non-intrusive, allows regional and/or demographic multiplicity leading to higher volumes, lower advertising prices and better targeted advertising through precise addressing. It delivers a whole new business model, is accessible to smaller advertisers and delivers an incremental revenue opportunity to rights holders, broadcasters, agencies and aggregators on its own or even alongside traditional advertising models.
