Victorious – the Santa Monica-based startup creating mobile applications for a growing number of emergent and established celebrities, as well as bonafide international entertainment franchises – just added significantly to its coffers. The company closed a fresh $25 million funding round on Tuesday, May 24, as first reported by Business Insider. New York and Herzilaya, Israel-based Marker LLC led the financing with Japan’s Dentsu Ventures in tow, while previous financial contributors Kleiner Perkins and Redpoint Ventures reupped their investments.
The company has raised upwards of $50 million to date. That’s a lot, especially in today’s cold fundraising climate (which at least one prominent venture capitalist predicts is a temperature of somewhere between “super cold or El Niño or something different altogether”). And Victorious’ ability to raise that quantity of cash from the aforementioned top-name investors speaks to its apps’ growing resonance with creators and fans.
To be clear, Victorious’ 100 or so applications currently in market are not simply mobile vehicles by which to view content. They’re virtual spaces that have celebrities, movie franchises, or other influential entities at their core, but engage the loyal fans of those celebrities, movie franchises, or other entities and empowers them to create, share, and discuss their own content. “A YouTube star may just upload one five-minute video a week, but where do his or her fans go to interact and engage the other six days, 23 hours, and 55 minutes of the week?” Victorious CEO, Sam Rogoway asked rhetorically in a quick interview with Tubefilter. “We’re looking at what happens during that downtime and providing a place for all those fans to go to where they can express themselves and interact with one another.”
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It seems to be working, too. In October, 2015, Victorious boasted over two million pieces of fan-generated content. Rogoway now says fans have published over 10 million pieces of content to the platform.
In other stats, Victorious says it has created no less than 15 apps that have charted in the Top 50 on the iTunes App Store in the past 12 months and those apps are doing far better than the industry average at bringing over fans from other platforms. 30 of Victorious’ apps have converted a given creator’s YouTube subscribers to applications downloads at a rate of at least 3% (conventional industry knowhow says this number is typically around 1%), while a few Victorious apps have attracted 10% of a given social media star’s subscriber base. If we take those numbers and use Lilly Singh (aka IISuperwomanII as an example), that means the Unicorn Island app currently has somewhere in the ballpark of 236,000 to 879,000 downloads.
The new influx of cash will help Victorious accelerate its global expansions and build more applications around an increasingly wide range of celebrities.
