A Ponte Vedra Beach investment firm has teamed up with the associations of professional football and baseball players to fund a multimillion-dollar investment in an Orlando company looking to innovate the corporate video production industry.
The local firm leading the investment is Vertus Ventures, an investment group founded by a team with over 45 years of private equity, banking, and public company management experience.
The investment in ToldRight is being made along with additional significant investment from OneTeam Partners LLC, a joint venture between the National Football League Players Association, Major League Baseball Players Association and RedBird Capital Partners LLC.
ToldRight on July 19 closed a Series A round that will enable the company to onboard more people to its digital network of creative professionals and further develop its proprietary technology, co-founder and CEO Max Heineman told Orlando Inno, a sister publication to the Business Journal.
Heineman declined to disclose the amount invested, but said the fundraising round will help the 18-month-old company become profitable. “We see profitability in the first half of next year,” he said.
ToldRight was founded by Heineman, a former vice president at the Golf Channel and NBC Sports Group, and President Adam Hertzog, an Emmy Award-winner whose career stops include ESPN, NBC Sports and HBO Sports. The pair saw large media companies increasingly making their creative video production talent part-time or freelancers. They started ToldRight in 2020 to build a network of vetted video production professionals that corporate clients can access on demand for video projects.
That network, which ToldRight calls “The Neighborhood,” consists of more than 1,700 people, 220 of whom are based in Central Florida. ToldRight’s goal is to pull workers who honed their craft at major names like ESPN into the fast-growing world of corporate video. A 2020 survey of companies by video software firm Vidyard found they increased video production 135% last year.
Companies and services that connect vet video production workers with projects are not unheard of, Vibrant Media Productions LLC co-founder and owner Alex Cascio told Orlando Inno. In fact, the Winter Park-based production firm has participated in some itself, Cascio said. “A lot of corporations, they have a trust network.”
ToldRight points to its end-to-end client assistance during projects and the quality and size of its talent network as elements that make the company stand out.
Hiring plans
The company of 10 full-time employees also expects to put some of the investment dollars into hiring in the second half of the year, Heineman said. He declined to say how many people ToldRight may hire, saying it will be organic based on the growth of the company.
The venture capital round kicked off February 2020 when ToldRight secured Vertus Ventures as its lead investor. The investment group was impressed with the business model crafted by ToldRight’s leadership team, Vertus Partner Tyler Brown said in a prepared statement.
