The ATDC is a community sponsor of the Atlanta CEO Council. As such I am generally invited to the CXO networking events (If you meet the criteria these are must attends).
Anyhow, upon registering to attend the March 19 event I was presented with a little survey. I don’t remember the exact questions but one of them was something along the lines of what company would make the next big splash in Atlanta. I had a write in candidate.
Viture is a platform that lets corporate customers solicit, edit, and publish, user-generated videos. Essentialy it is meant to stop UGC from being Tahoed.
Nice space to be in.
Vitrue was founded by Reggie Bradford of WebMD and N2Broadband fame. Based on his success there, he was able to raise $2.2 million on the concept from General Catalyst Partners. They used that cash to promptly buy Sharkle and then went out promptly raised a bit more from the likes of Comcast, Turner, Ron Conway, and some local Atlanta investors that I used to share an office with to bring the total to $5 million.
Reggie is doing a grand job building out a first class team. Robert Sanders was recently hired to architect the platform and make it more scalable and he dragged Sudish over with him. I hear they are looking for a CFO with public company experience.
On top of all of this Vitrue was named as a Business 2.0 Next Net company.
Let’s see, proven manager, strong team, big market, PR mojo, and well-funded by quality backers. Pretty good mix.
The only question that I have about the business is will users want to generate content within a walled garden? Me thinks not but enabling them to put the content generated out into the wild of YouTube, Revver, and the like should solve that.