French video sharing startup vpod.tv announces $5.1M Series A

My good friend Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, and co-host of the CGS dinners (entrepreneurs dinners Rodrigo, Marc Goldberg and I host when I am in Paris),  just im-ed me to announce the close of a $5.1M Series A round in his video sharing/editing startup, vpod.tv. The round was led by Innovacom, a firm with offices in Paris and San Francisco. Even though I have shared in the past my view that the video sharing space is already well capitalized, and is getting a bit over-crowded, I am thrilled for Rodrigo and his co-founder Ivan Communod. They have been working very hard to get to this point, evangelizing video-blogging and its benefits to brands, advertisers and media companies.

Mike Arrington has met with Rodrigo (see the brief interview) and Ivan at Innovate Europe 06 this week, and has just published a review of the service. Vpod offers a broad set of features, including the ability to integrate advertising in videos, a baked in monetization for vpod.tv-ers, a wide variety of output/device formats, and great editing tools. So they might have a shot at building a European franchise that spans consumer and professional markets. That is what I sincerely wish to them.

Congratulations!

More:

• Om adds his own analysis: Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, a fellow blogger and broadband fanatic, is either a very brave man or has a plan.
  

Tags: vpod.tv

Comments

[yq zhang]

would he be interested in porting his video blog to China? we would be very interested to jointly develop that market in China.....we run over 20 verticle blogs sites in China today, examples are -

www.imagii.com for creativity
www.cistory.com for Chinese history
www.cnii8.com for youth
www.wiiii.com for woman
and so on.....

[David de TalentPower!]

I was waiting for such big news for one of the best team and web2.0-video project in europe. I'm more than happy for them. BRAVO !!

[Daniel Gergès]

Congrats to him ! and thanks for the scoop (you blogged him even before he did :)