Viddy gets celebrity backing from Will Smith, Jay-Z companies
Video-sharing app Viddy got a pretty nice financial boost on Monday, with backing from production companies that Jay-Z (Roc Nation) and Will Smith (Overbrook Entertainment) head. The New York Times says they join $6 million in funding that Viddy received from traditional venture capitalists in February.
Viddy, released in 2011, lets users upload 15-second videos with a number of filters -- think Instagram for video.
The New York Times claims the service currently has 10 million users, with an additional 300,000 signing up per day. Those number of signups per day seems unrealistically high, especially since Viddy posted on April 11 that the site has 4 million users, with 100,000 joining per day. If the numbers provided by the NYT are correct, that would mean more than 109.5 million would join Viddy within the next year. Compare it to Instagram, which launched in October 2010 and has 27 million users as of the end of March.
Steve Sande took a look at Viddy last year and predicted that the app would be hot. If these user numbers do happen to hold up, don't be surprised if Viddy turns out to be Facebook's next billion-dollar acquisition.
