Paris, France – July 12th, 2005 – glowria, France's leading online DVD rental company, announced today that it has raised €4 million/$4.8 million. SPEF Venture's e-fund led the round, which completes the €8.5 million Series A. The new capital will be used for marketing efforts and the launch of France's largest independent Video on Demand (VoD) service. Previous investors in glowria include Mousse Partners and several business angels.
Glowria, which features the largest DVD rental catalogue in France with more than 80% of available titles, has strategic, performance-based partnerships, including Bertelsmann's book club, France Loisirs, and the major ISPs and portals in France. In addition, glowria is the only independent company in Europe to have extensive revenue-sharing partnerships with all the major movie studios and vast majority of independent video distributors. These agreements allow glowria to control subscriber acquisition costs and optimize stock acquisition costs, thus offering excellent quality of service and the highest stock availability in the European market, which translates into low churn.
Targeted at French households equipped with DVD players, glowria is eyeing over 15 million households, mainly composed of families with children who regularly consume in-house entertainment through cable, satellite and pay television, and have a low frequentation rate of attending movie theaters.
In 2005, glowria expanded its offering to include games downloads and will soon add video on demand to its capabilities, fulfilling founder Mihai Crasneanu's vision of the company. “Glowria has one mission: deliver personalized on-demand entertainment content at home. Digital distribution of that content is the natural continuation of our activity, and what our subscribers are asking for.”
"We are pleased to be able to contribute to financing the development of glowria, the future European leader in Internet video distribution,” said Arnaud Filhol of SPEF Venture and a new member of glowria's board of directors. “We feel that glowria possesses all the necessary elements: the confidence of the major film studios and publishers, and thus, the most complete catalogue in the market; market-tested knowledge and quality. These are the same things that enabled glowria to build the strongest subscriber portfolio in France in only a few months.""
A first mover in the online DVD rental market, glowria's online DVD rental service was launched in October 2003. Since then, glowria has quickly surpassed local competition and is the leading online DVD rental company in France. In addition, glowria is on target to reach breakeven in the 2nd quarter of 2006, and is in advanced discussions with international VCs to finance an aggressive European expansion.
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ABOUT GLOWRIA
Founded in 2001, glowria is the leading online DVD rental service in France. It features the largest catalog of titles, a wide range of subscription options, no late fees, and does not provide adult films. For more information about glowria, please visit www.glowria.fr.
ABOUT SPEF VENTURE
SPEF Venture, a subsidiary of Natexis Private Equity, is one of the premier venture capital funds in France with more than 300M€ under management and nearly 80 portfolio companies in industries such as, amongst others, telecommunications, semiconductors, computer software, e-commerce, security and life sciences. With a team of 15 professionals, SPEF Venture guides portfolio companies through all stages of their development, and brings to bear its expertise to help the management of each portfolio company team create breakthrough companies. For more information, please visit www.spef-venture.fr.
