Vidyard gets $50-million boost, set to double workforce

Waterloo Region’s startup scene has another success story.

Kitchener-based Vidyard is getting a US $35-million investment from Battery Ventures in Boston — amounting to nearly $50-million in Canadian funds.

Not bad for a company that started five years ago with only five full-time employees.

“When [co-founder Michael Litt and I] went out to the Y Combinator program [in Silicon Valley], there was one of Mike and [my] really close friends from school, a buddy from the Valley, and then another gentleman we met locally who was another great software developer,” says Devon Galloway, co-founder of Vidyard.

“And that was it.”

LISTEN: Vidyard co-founder Devon Galloway speaks with 570’s Martin Bauman

Today, the company has 100 employees and expects to double its workforce to 200 by the end of 2016.

“We actually just purchased some office space around the corner that we’re going to be moving into in the summer, which gives us enough space for just about 300 people,” Galloway says.

“So a lot of growth to get to that point. Being 100 today, we’ll probably move over there in the 120-130 range.”

Vidyard is just the latest success story to emerge in Kitchener-Waterloo, a startup community Galloway says he’s excited to be a part of:

“One of the biggest things we were told by an early advisor in Y Combinator was [that] the biggest challenge we would have was hiring great people, and it was a thing that Michael and I knew we could really solve [by] coming back to Kitchener-Waterloo.”

Vidyard says the money will go towards speeding up sales of the company’s video marketing platform.

Despite the company’s growth, its co-founder says there’s still plenty of work to be done.

“OpenText is a very, very large publicly-traded company; BlackBerry, at its peak, was an $80-billion company; we’ve got a long way to go,” says Galloway.

“But [we] certainly believe we have the roadmap to get there, and I’m incredibly excited and humbled to be a part of that group.”