Content Syndicate Announces Investment By IV Holdings

Content Syndicate has officially announced that it has received strategic investment from Interactive Ventures Holding Company (“IV Holdings”), a leading venture capital firm, focused on internet and interactive companies, and based out of Amman, Jordan.

The funding will be used to support Content Syndicate’s rapid growth and development of its content services platform.

“In its private beta alone, Content Syndicate, with its unique and disruptive business model, as well as its dynamic management track record, impressed us. More importantly, the strong validation the company has received from major customers and publishers, combined with our investment strategy focused on the development of content syndication in our region, made Content Syndicate a great fit. Very few early-stage companies have this kind of amazing traction and robust business model,” said Fawaz H. Zu’bi, Chairman of IV Holdings.

Content Syndicate’s patent-pending platform helps publishers to commission, buy, sell, syndicate content in more than 200 languages. With no entry-level costs, coupled with its ‘pay for performance’ model, Content Syndicate helps publishers to monetize their content further and minimizing the inefficiency, thereby generating additional revenues and cutting costs. The company intends to extend its service to support other media – audio, video and mobile content in 2009.

According to Romieke/Cision, a leading media intelligence provider, there are more than 218,000 publishers of magazines, newspapers, trade journals, online portals, news wires and contract publishers – all of who produce and consume content with a high a frequency. Of these, more than 4,000 publishers are present in the Middle East alone with huge traction in emerging markets such as Middle East, India, and China.

Outlook, a respected industry research and advisory, pegs the content aggregation and syndication business alone at US$68 billion market with more than 16.8 billion words and 1.8 billion photos being sold the past year.

Maddy Reddy, Founder and CEO of Content Syndicate, said that “IV Holdings, with their impressive portfolio, track record and focus on ICT investments gave us the confidence. Their experience, network and insights into the industry made them the strategic investor, and more importantly the partner, we were seeking.” 

Content Syndicate has already successfully raised a substantial amount of seed capital from influential angel investors in US, UK, UAE and India within the first six months of operations alone.

Prior to this major investment, Content Syndicate was a finalist at Seedcamp, a leading start-up launch pad in London. CS was selected from 260 start-ups in 42 countries and the only Middle East firm to be chosen for their innovative business model. Similarly in February this year, the firm was selected in the top 3 out of 150 start-ups at an event held by Arab Business Angels Network, a subsidiary of Dubai International Capital (DIC) at DIFC. Besides this it also won the Best Start-up at the Visa Business and TiE-ISB Connect awards.

The amount of the investment by IV Holdings has not been disclosed.