ACP, Van den Ende & Deitmers and Business Growth Fund invest $25m in Unruly

Unruly, the award-winning global technology platform for social video advertising, today announced a $25 million Series A investment from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmers and Business Growth Fund. The financing is the largest ever for a private company in the social video space and will be used to accelerate international growth and cement Unruly’s position as the global leader in this fast-growing area.

With a revenue run-rate approaching $50 million (2011 full year revenue $25 million) and profitable since 2009, Unruly has 100 staff across nine offices and is doubling in size each year. The company has delivered a number of high profile social video campaigns for global brands, including Evian’s “Roller Babies,” T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing,” Coca Cola’s “Happiness Factory” series and Old Spice’s “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign.
Across the industry, social video campaigns generated 2.7 billion views in 2010, more than 8 billion views in 2011 and are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012.

Brands and agencies have quickly recognized the power of social video to make an emotional connection with their audience, influence consumers and ignite conversations. However, media fragmentation and device proliferation make it extremely difficult to do this at the scale they require. Unruly solves this problem by providing a truly global media and technology platform for social video advertising that reaches 725 million people across 74 countries.
“Today represents an important milestone for the company and social video as a whole,” said Unruly founder and Group CEO Scott Button. “Five years ago, we set out to help brands capture the massive opportunity in social video and we’re delighted that such a distinguished group of investors share our conviction.”

Since Unruly’s inception in London in 2006, the company has delivered, tracked and audited 1.34 billion user-intended video views and executed 1,400+ successful social video campaigns for some of the world’s leading global brands, including Old Spice, Electronic Arts, adidas, Unilever, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.
“Unruly’s proprietary technology platform and aggressive global growth strategy in a fast-growing market is really impressive,” said Richard Anton, Partner at Amadeus Capital Partners. “We are delighted to be supporting the company build on its success, bringing our experience of building a number of international marketing and advertising technology companies, including Celltick, ComQi and EPiServer.”

“With global online ad spend set to reach $110 billion by 2014 and online video ad spend predicted to be the fastest growing category, we believe Unruly is strongly positioned to be the winner in the global social video market,” said Martijn Hamann, Partner of Van den Ende & Deitmers.
“In a short space of time, Unruly has played a major role in the explosive growth of social video and this investment gives it additional firepower,” said Marion Bernard, Regional Director of BGF. “We look forward to working with the company and our co-investors to take advantage of the very significant global expansion opportunities. BGF is working in partnership with other investors to expand the pool of investment capital to growing and ambitious UK companies as a key part of developing the entrepreneurial economy”

Unruly’s proprietary technology, RAMP (Real-time Amplification and Measurement Platform), powers the entire social video campaign lifecycle and their Viral Video Chart is widely recognized as the Billboard Hot 100 of the Internet generation. Unruly is a whitelisted Facebook partner and its video ad charts are syndicated to major outlets, including Mashable, The Guardian, Adweek, Die Welt and the IAB.
Torch Partners and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP advised on the deal.