Videoplaza secures €3.5 million from leading Nordic VCs

[Sweden] Stockholm-based Videoplaza, the video ad server startup, has secured a €3.5 million funding round from leading Nordic VCs Creandum and Northzone Ventures.

This follows seed investments of €80,000 and €420,000, bringing the total raised to-date to €4m.

The company, which currently has a staff of 20 based in Sweden, the UK and France, will use the new capital to continue to expand operations in Europe including Germany, Spain and Italy, and attract new customers for its Monetizer ad server platform for managing, displaying and tracking video advertising.

Videoplaza targets broadcasters, newspaper publishers and other premium media owners and has to-date partnered with several leading European media companies including Sweden’s TV4 Group, Denmark’s Ekstrabladet, La Vanguardia in Spain, and myvideorights.com and Incisive Media in the UK (see TCE coverage).

Founded in 2007, impressively, the company says it reached break-even in November 2009.

Pär-Jörgen Pärson, General Partner at Northzone, says of the investment: “Video consumption today is changing substantially in its shift away from television… We are impressed with how fast Videoplaza has already penetrated the key European markets, where advertising is poised for exponential growth in the coming years”.

Competitors include a number of European solutions built on top of Doubleclick/Adtech, which Videoplaza argues is an insufficient model, along with a number of US-based offerings which have yet to enter Europe.

That’s unlikely to stay the same forever, however. But with a new war chest of cash, it looks like Videoplaza’s European stronghold is theirs to lose.