How Vidyard’s $35-Million Series C Round Came to Be

A dinner with Battery Ventures partner Michael Brown and a pair of his associates ultimately led to this week’s news that Vidyard had raised US$35 million in Series C financing.

In an interview at Vidyard’s Kitchener offices, Litt recounted a fateful series of events that began to unfold last spring, just a few months after the company announced its US$18-million Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners in Silicon Valley. While the Bessemer deal followed a sometimes-fraught, years-long, cat-and-mouse courtship, the Battery deal was practically a shotgun wedding by comparison.

Despite Vidyard having just raised the B round last January, a Battery associate named Sanjiv Kalevar came to visit in May.

“Funds reach out all the time, and funds generally have these teams – they call them associates or analysts – who are junior people; they cannot write cheques, but they are just there to contact companies,” Litt said.

While some argue it’s a waste of a founder’s time to deal with associates, since only partners can write deals, Litt sees it differently.

Read the full article on Communitech.