Business Growth Fund

Leading Social Video Company Attracts First Investment

PRESS RELEASE

London, New York, Amsterdam, 4th January 2012

One of the world’s fastest growing social video distribution companies, Unruly, has attracted $25m funding from Amadeus Capital Partners, Van den Ende & Deitmers and Business Growth Fund.

Unruly has delivered a number of high profile social video campaigns for global brands, including Evian’s “Roller Babies” and T-Mobile’s “Life’s for Sharing”.

The funding, which is the largest for a private company in the social video sector, is the company’s first institutional round and will be used to strengthen its European market leadership position, expand its already successful US business and establish a footprint in Asia.  Unruly is a profitable company, with 2011 revenues of $25m.

Established in the UK and headquartered in London’s Tech City, Unruly has since inception in 2006 become a multi award-winning global business, distributing sponsored video content for media agencies and brands through a network of over 10,000 publisher websites, platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, influential blogs and mobile applications. Distribution currently reaches 725m unique users each month (see http://goo.gl/ahRhf for how it works).

Apart from its reach, which makes it one of the largest distribution platforms in the world, Unruly’s prime differentiator is the unique analysis it provides its customers, through a proprietary storehouse of video interaction data that enables the company to match content to the optimal publisher to achieve maximum brand engagement.  Unruly has delivered, tracked and audited 1.34 billion user-selected video views and executed more than 1,400 successful social video campaigns for some of the world’s leading global brands, including Unilever, EA, Adidas, T-Mobile and Coca-Cola.

Brands and agencies increasingly recognise the power of social video to build high-impact, long-term emotional connections with their audiences, influence consumers and ignite conversations. Social video campaigns are predicted to generate 20 billion views in 2012, with numbers rising each year.
 
“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, representing more than 20% of total ad spend, 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 for London and the South East at Business Growth Fund. “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.”

“Today represents an important milestone for the company and social video as a whole,” said Unruly CEO and co-founder 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.”

Richard Anton, Martijn Hamann and Marion Bernard all join the Unruly Board of Directors.  Together, the three investors hold a minority stake in Unruly.

Advisers on the investment were: Torch Partners and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP for Unruly Media and for the investors: Taylor Wessing/Berwin Leighton Paisner (legal), Baker Tilly Corporate Finance LLP (accounting due diligence), Hampton Court Capital (commercial due diligence), Transition People (management due diligence).

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Chantal Ligertwood, PR for Amadeus: +44 (0)7976 229 210 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Wendy Horlings, PR for Van den Ende & Deitmers, +31 20 794 77 77
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Emily Weston or Jane Kirby, PR for Business Growth Fund, Equity Dynamics
+44 (0)7825 326 442/441 .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) / .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Kayla Zerby, PR for Unruly, The Morris + King Company, (212) 561-7454
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About Amadeus
Amadeus Capital Partners is one of Europe’s leading technology venture capital firms, with £500m under management. Since its inception in 1997, the firm has backed nearly 70 companies in industries that include communications and networking hardware and software, cleantech, medtech, computer hardware and software, media, and e-commerce.  Major businesses built by the firm include CSR plc (LSE:CSR), the leading producer of single chip bluetooth radios for short range connections, Solexa Ltd, the developer of next generation genetic analysis systems, merged into Illumina, Inc. (ILMN) to create the world-leader in gene-sequencing technology and Transmode, a networking solutions business that had an over-subscribed IPO on NASDAQ OMX Stockholm in May 2011. 
For more information, please visit www.amadeuscapital.com

About Van den Ende & Deitmers
Van den Ende & Deitmers is the venture capital firm of Endemol founder Joop van den Ende and former Endemol board member Hubert Deitmers. The firm invests in European crossmedia enterprises that have the potential to grow internationally. Its focus is on Content, Platforms, E-commerce and related ICT services. Since the firm was established in 2006, it has invested in a variety of companies, including casual gaming platform Spil Games (number 1 worldwide), television producer Eyeworks (top 5 independent producer worldwide), online market research agency Metrixlab (top 5 worldwide) and online video advertising company Smartclip (number 1 in Europe, now part of Adconion). Last months, it invested in Improve Digital, Pictura and Quadia. Social network Hyves (number 1 in The Netherlands), contact centre Unamic/HCN (top 3 in Europe), online photoalbum producer Albumprinter (top 3 in Europe) and ICT hard- & software webshop CentralPoint (no 1 in The Netherlands) were successfully sold recently. 
For further information, please visit www.endeit.com

About Business Growth Fund
Business Growth Fund (BGF) has been established to help Britain’s fast growing smaller and medium sized businesses.  Growth potential is the key criteria. BGF will invest between £2m and £10m per business in return for a minimum 10 per cent equity stake and a seat on the board for a BGF director. BGF will provide long-term equity investment for those growing companies that today do not have access to this source of capital.  As such BGF hopes to be a catalyst for growth among smaller UK companies.
The investment in Unruly Media is BGF’s third investment since its launch in May 2011.
BGF an independent company with capital of up to £2.5 billion, backed by five of the UK’s main banking groups - Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, RBS, and Standard Chartered.  BGF is managed completely autonomously with an independent management team. 
www.bgf.co.uk  

About Unruly
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in London, Unruly is the global platform for social video advertising. With offices in New York, Paris, Sydney, San Francisco, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Berlin, Unruly has delivered, tracked & audited 1.34 billion video views and executed 1,400+ successful social video campaigns for global brands and agencies including T-Mobile’s acclaimed Life’s for Sharing series, Evian’s global Roller Babies hit, Old Spice’s game-changing “Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign, Coke’s Happiness series and Google’s Search Stories.
Reaching an audience of 725 million monthly unique users, Unruly distributes social video campaigns across platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, premium publisher sites, influential blogs and mobile applications.
For more information, visit www.unrulymedia.com.