Ireland’s Movidia has raised $14M (£8M) in Series A funding from an international consortium led by Celtic House Venture Partners and Capital-E, and will expand its board of directors as a result of the investment.
Movidia is a semiconductor company whose technology provides video editing and post production capabilities that facilitate the creation of user generated content for mobile social networking. The company’s software caters specifically to low power mobile phone and consumer electronics that require moderate amounts of energy.
Movidia’s ISAAC microprocessor-based system-on-chip device has already taped out and is set to launch on the commercial market early 2009, with production quantities due in the second half of next year. Users will be able to do complex in-clip editing to add post-production effects such as slow motion and super resolution zoom to their own video content in real-time and on the move without the need for a PC.
I can’t see myself editing videos on my phone before exporting them to my computer, but I can see it take off in countries like Asia, where mobile penetration is mugh higher and people do much more with their phones. However, I think it’s a poor decision that they want to maintain full control over the software without open sourcing at least parts of it or forming a developer community around it. Movidia CEO Sean Mitchell did state however that they intend to plug in to commom frameworks and release APIs in the future.
The company has a 50-person workforce working from offices in Dublin, Hong Kong and Romania.