Vimeo is entering the shortform video business with the acquisition of Magisto, a service allowing users to create short videos that can be exported to any platform.
Financial details weren’t disclosed by either company, but Israeli business newspaper Globes reports Vimeo will pay $200 million when the deal closes sometime in the second quarter of this year. (Magisto is headquarted in Menlo Park, Calif., but has offices in Israel.)
In a blog post about the deal, Magisto CEO and cofounder Oren Boiman wrote to Magisto’s 100 million users, “By combining forces with Vimeo, we will be able to offer you a more valuable all-in-one video marketing solution that goes way beyond creation to include collaboration, hosting and management, distribution, analytics, monetization, livestreaming, and more.”
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After the acquisition is completed, Magisto’s 75 employees will become part of Vimeo, where they’ll work to develop new shortform video tools for the video giant, Variety reports. (Currently, users can upload short videos to Vimeo, but the platform is known for hosting longer, artful pieces.) The deal will pay off for Magisto’s users, too — as Boiman mentioned above — since they’ll all gain access to Vimeo’s range of creator tools.
Magisto was founded in 2009 and has raised $22.5 million in funding from investors including SanDisk Ventures, Horizons Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, and Qualcomm Ventures.
The deal is the first large acquisition Vimeo has made since 2017, when it acquired Livestream to launch Vimeo Live. Prior to that, in 2016, it acquired digital distribution platform VHX.
