Maker Studios was the original MCN (multi-channel network) built on YouTube and really helped to define the entire industry.
It was started by creators and largely served as the Product Development group fro YouTube early on. It grew from 1MM monthly to 11BN monthly views views across its channels and $3M in revenue to more than $300M in revenue from 2010 to 2016 (confidential – estimate from Disney).
Greycroft led the Company’s Series A financing and participated in the Series B, C and C-1 financings as well. We were instrumental in recruiting the entire executive team – CEO, COO, VP Bus Dev, CTO. We introduced Time Warner to the company to lead its Series C round of funding and to Disney who ultimately acquired the Company.
When we first met the Maker Studios team, one of the founders, Lisa Donovan’s YouTube channel, Lisa Nova, was the #1 channel on YouTube with 1000 subscribers. There were multiple bidders for the business and the ultimate exit value, post-earnouts was about $785M. Our initial investment was made at a $5MM pre-money valuation and we returned $76MM on our total investment of $5MM.
