Once-Hot App Viddy Returns $18 Million To Investors And Prepares A Final Attempt To Turn Around

May 9, 2013 Leave a comment

Once-Hot App Viddy Returns $18 Million To Investors And Prepares A Final Attempt To Turn Around

Alyson Shontell | May 8, 2013, 9:23 AM | 1,362 | 2

Last summer, social video app Viddy was in a much different place. It was in a battle to be the “Instagram of Video” alongside competitor SocialCam, and its number of users surged higher every day. Viddy used that momentum to raise a $30 million Series B round from investors such as Khosla Ventures, NEA and Goldman Sachs. Even Shakira invested. But the traffic was temporary. Viddy grew quickly on Facebook‘s platform, but Facebook cut off the traffic hose when news broke that people were getting spammed by social video apps. Viddy’s executive team has all but left, including its CEO and its head of business development. In February, one-third of the staff was laid off. Now, Viddy is giving itself one last go. It’s returning $18 million to investors and keeping the remaining millions to try a few more product launches. “Viddy raised a substantial amount of capital last year, during different market conditions,” Viddy’s president, JJ Aguhob, told AllThingsD. “A year later, Viddy is a leaner, product-focused organization that is steadily growing its audience and will soon be releasing new products. Our late-stage investors have been very supportive, but it just makes good business sense to return capital we do not need and have a clean balance sheet in the process.” Having to return all that cash isn’t the most painful part of Viddy’s story either. Last year, Viddy reportedly turned down a $100 million buyout offer from Twitter when the app was on the upswing.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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