Bambi's Vator.TV, a pitch platform for entrepreneurs, raises round
Bambi Francisco, the former MarketWatch columnist who left last month amid a stir to form her own video company, has finished raising a round of capital.
The round includes Richard Rosenblatt, the former chief executive of Intermix, owner of MySpace, Georges Harick, a former Google engineer who helped develop Adsense, and Matthew Hill, early investor of Shopping.com and, as expected Peter Thiel, former chief executive of PayPal. She is keeping the amount confidential, but we expect it is at least several hundred thousand dollars.
Click on the image above for a link to a video showing Bambi talking about her company Vator.TV with Rosenblatt, after he steals the mic from someone else (Andy Plesser, of Beet.TV).
Entrepreneurs will be able to pitch their ideas in video, Powerpoint or other document. They can then upload it to Vator.TV, either password protected (where chosen investors can view the pitch) or publicly. In other words, a video form of RaiseCapital.com (see VB coverage). The site will soft launch next week, with a more formal launch later on. Early videos will feature Francisco and Thiel.
Rosenblatt is chief executive of Demand Media (see our coverage), which is buying up generic Web sites and searching for content to fill them up with. He’s also been marketing the .TV domain category, and Francisco said Vator.TV will likely be participating in that, though specifics haven’t been agreed. She said Rosenblatt is a significant investor.
Francisco said she was able to access Amazon’s EC2 offering, which will lower the costs of streaming the video.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
