Thought Equity Motion Raises $25M from Shamrock Capital
This morning, Thought Equity Motion, the Denver, Colorado-based company that's made big inroads in the areas of digitizing, archiving, and managing metadata for premium content owners, announced that it has raised $25 million from Shamrock Capital Advisers. Thought Equity plans to use the money to accelerate the development of value-added features, strengthen its sales team, invest in research and development, and build out its infrastructure and storage.
The company has been growing at a fast and consistent rate, says CEO and founder Kevin Schaff. Over the past eight years, Thought Equity Motion has taken in 400 premium content media libraries and converted them from tape to digital. Seeing the need for storage for all that material, it opened its own platform and has focused on becoming a premiere destination for cloud media storage. The platform is growing at a rate of one petabyte per month, says Schaff. He expects that rate to double in six months.
Media companies need a different level of software and management, explains Schaff, and that's Thought Equity's differentiator.
The company's storage facility is in Wyoming, chosen, Schaff says, for its low power and bandwidth costs, and because it's an area safe from natural disasters.
The NCAA worked with Thought Equity to create a tapeless workflow for March Madness this year, says Schaff. Every hour of programming was fed directly into the Though Equity system, which provided large scale cloud storage and mass delivery on-demand. By going tapeless, the NCAA eliminated shipping and satellite requirements, and was able to automate many of its post-production services.
Other Thought Equity customers include BBC Motion Gallery, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, National Geographic, and The New York Times.
"We're excited to be working with Shamrock, as their expertise and relationships in the media space will add tremendous value as we scale our business," says Schaff. "We estimate that the market for video management at over $2 billion and growing at over 30 percent per year. The industry is at an inflection point with respect to digital workflows, and we are driving the transformation to cloud-based storage and access models that represent the next stage in the evolution of video production."
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