Your videos are yours. You shouldn’t have to pay a middleman to get them up and it should be simple to monetize YOUR own videos. Whether you are a company or not, Zype is for you. With cross device ease and audience insights, you can become more connected to your videos and get ahead of your competition. Make content easily discoverable with Zype.
Ed Laczynski, CEO, tells AlleyWatch about their engaging product and how it’s a must have if you want a good media player.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Revel Partners and a syndicate of strategic individual and institution investors. Seed round. $1.6M
Tell us about your product or service.
Zype is a cloud platform for video publishing and distribution.
We make it easy for content owners to sell video directly to their audience with subscriptions, transactions, or ads, across any device platform.
What inspired you to start the company?
We saw how difficult it was for people to get access to the content they love on the devices they use.
How is it different?
Only Zype gives content owners access to the full streaming tech stack – including set top app, web, and mobile app delivery – without having to learn complex development, or be stuck with costly revenue share models.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
We target the enterprise content owner market, including broadcasters, creators, and library owners like movie houses.
What’s your business model?
We sell Software as a Service.
What was the funding process like?
Lots of work, we found a great investment team that believed in our team, our product, and had a great direct network of customers and talent to tap from.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Communicating our message.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
The message of “direct to consumer video” and “set top TV apps” wasn’t cool in 2013. It’s really cool in 2015 and we were there early with great customers and a passionate team.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We plan to have over 70 paying enterprise customers, well over 100 apps in marketplace powered by our platform, and triple the number of video player impressions and revenue that runs through our platform in the next six months.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Keep your costs low as possible, focus on sales, and stitch in the amazing ecosystem of software to drive feature and sales growth, rather than trying to build everything yourself.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We just opened up an office in Los Angeles. I see us opening up for business in Europe and Asia in 2016.
Where is your favorite place to enjoy the fall weather in the area?
I love the High Line and taking drives upstate NY or western NJ in these fall months.
