MoviePilot Seals $7M Series B Funding Led By DFJ Esprit

It’s easy to miss the launch of the latest movies. You get a week of marketing and by the time you’ve figured out if you want to see it or not, it’s moved off the theatre and you’re waiting for the DVD release. Most movie marketing dollars are spent in these first few days. So MoviePilot, launched out of Berlin, brings upcoming films to fans based on their taste, turning the marketing model on its head and making better use of budgets. It focuses solely on upcoming movie projects and TV shows so that fans are less likely to miss new releases. This gives them a place to gather often long before official homepages are created, finding the right film for its natural audience and the right audience for a film.

Today it’s sealed a $7 million Series B financing, led by leading venture capital firm DFJ Esprit, and continued participation from existing VC funds T-Venture, Grazia Equity and VC Fund Creative Industries Berlin. This will be used to expand in the US and develop the platform.

Tobi Bauckhage, MoviePilot CEO and co-founder says “The campaigns we have already run on behalf of the world’s biggest studios have given us a fantastic base to further develop our brand of social marketing services for movies.”

So far MoviePilot worked with studios like Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Disney and Paramount in the US and worldwide on movies such as “Chronicle”. Moviepilot.com and sister site Moviepilot.de have a combined Facebook fanbase of 5.4 million.

Disney, Universal and Paramount have been working with the German version of Moviepilot.de since its launch in 2007.

MoviePilot was founded by filmmakers Tobias Bauckhage and Jon Handschin (CPO), as well as former OMDB founder Benjamin Krause (CTO). The company has previously received funding from Grazia Equity, Passion Capital’s Stefan Glanzer and Deutsche Telekom Ventures, as well as Peter Read, who previously ran Nielsen Entertainment for the movie studios in Los Angeles.

I interviewed Bauckhage in Berlin: