Media content management startup Cloudinary valued at $2B in $100M+ secondary sale

Cloudinary Ltd., a startup that helps brands manage their media content and ensure it loads quickly for users, has secured a more than $100 million secondary investment from Blackstone Growth. 

The investment, announced today, values Cloudinary at $2 billion. The deal comes a few months after the startup reached another major business milestone: Its annualized recurring revenue passed $100 million in December. 

Santa Clara, California-based Cloudinary provides a set of cloud services that companies can use to manage their images and videos. The startup’s services also help with related tasks, such as ensuring that media content loads quickly for website and app users. 

Cloudinary’s product portfolio includes a set of application programming interfaces for editing media content. Companies can use the APIs to perform tasks such as cropping an image or a video, resizing it, adding captions and changing the file’s format. A built-in artificial intelligence tool automates repetitive chores such as file tagging to free up time for users. 

Cloudinary also helps companies optimize their media assets to speed up content loading times. The startup provides a service that can evaluate a user’s connection speed and automatically determine the extent to which files must be compressed to ensure fast loading. Cloudinary also optimizes files in other ways, such as by changing their format when doing so can save bandwidth. 

The startup uses multiple content delivery networks to load media assets for users. For every website or app visit, Cloudinary chooses the content delivery network that can provide the fastest loading times. For brands, meanwhile, the startup provides a dashboard that enables them to track their content optimization efforts and find opportunities to make improvements.

Companies such as online retailers can have upwards of hundreds of thousands of media assets in their websites and apps. Managing such a large number of files is especially difficult because there are often multiple versions of each asset. A retailer, for example, might prepare three different versions of its logo: one for its mobile app, another for use on its website and a third to display on point-of-sale systems. 

Cloudinary provides a centralized library that enables companies to store their media assets in one place for easy access. As part of its feature set, the library offers tools that promise to help users manage the different versions of a file used throughout their company. 

In addition to leading the more than $100 billion secondary investment that Cloudinary announced today, Blackstone Growth has committed to “supporting Cloudinary’s future business expansion,” including acquisitions. Cloudinary made its first acquisition only a few weeks ago: The startup in January bought video software maker Indivio Inc. for an undisclosed sum.

Cloudinary told Forbes that it doesn’t plan to make additional acquisitions in the near future. However, Cloudinary is reportedly exploring opportunities in the virtual reality, augmented reality and blockchain segments. 

Cloudinary says it manages more than 60 billion files for nearly 10,000 companies. The startup’s customers include major brands such as Atlassian Corp. Plc, NBC, Sony Group Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.’s Whole Foods supermarket chain. Cloudinary has managed to establish such a significant market presence despite never raising any outside investments with the exception of secondary sales and bootstrapping its operations since launch. 

Image: Cloudinary