MetaCafe lands $15m more for filtered video sharing

Israel based video sharing MetaCafe has announced that it has received $15 million in funding from Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners. Founded in 2004, MetaCafe uses a filtering algorithm to prescreen videos before they appear on the site. A desktop client is used to upload and download the videos, only about two dozen of which are newly approved each day. The end results of that filtering are viewed by 20 million unique visitors each week. Instead of a YouTube style fat pipe of content, MetaCafe relies on just a tiny number of high-quality selected videos to drive a large amount of traffic. It’s like YouTube meets Fark.

Benchmark Capital has made investments in eBay, Zillow.com, Pagflakes and many other online services. Benchmark had given MetaCafe $5 mill in a previous round of funding. Accel Partners adds Metacafe to a portfolio that includes Brightcove, comScore, RealNetworks and Walmart.com.

The company will use its new funding to ramp up its infrastructure and open an office in San Francisco.