Backlight Acquires Wildmoka, Four Other Companies

Wildmoka has been acquired by Backlight, a global media technology holding company backed by a growth equity firm, PSG. Backlight announced the acquisition of Wildmoka and four other visionary media technology companies, all serving media, entertainment and video-forward customers with cloud-based solutions that help improve every step of the media content lifecycle.

“Digital coverage across OTT and social media has become the strategic battlefield for broadcasters and rights owners as they seek to conquer audience attention. Wildmoka’s Digital Media Factory is helping them navigate this ultra-competitive landscape,” says Cristian Livadiotti, CEO of Wildmoka. “We believe joining Backlight will allow us to accelerate the pace of our innovation, and address even more opportunities to deliver powerful solutions for our customers.”

Co-founded by Livadiotti and Thomas Menguy, the company’s CTO, Wildmoka is used by top-tier sports and news broadcasters to streamline video editing, multi-versioning and hyper-distribution to all digital destinations. Wildmoka’s Digital Media Factory empowers non-technical-savvy content owners to create an unlimited amount of live streams, highlight reels and near-live clips, at speed and scale. All of this content can be distributed in one-click to multiple digital channels including web, mobile, OTT and social networks.

“Reaching digital excellence is a marathon, not a sprint, and so we expect our technology partners to constantly innovate and invest to help us stay ahead of the game. Wildmoka has been a strong partner over the last three years, helping us to hyper-produce and hyper-distribute digital content, in both on-and-off domains (i.e. on OTT and social media),” says Guillaume Postaire, Media Factory Director at France Télévisions. “We’re now excited to see them securing a strategic growth investment that seeks to further strengthen their ability to contribute to our success.”

“We believe what Cristian, Thomas and the Wilmoka team have accomplished in building incredible products used strategically by some of the top global brands in sports and news is remarkable,” says Ben Kaplan, CEO of Backlight. “Integrating AI, intuitive user experiences, scalable cloud production, and distribution workflows to drive growth for their business and their customers made them a great fit for the Backlight strategy.”

Wildmoka is joined by four other fast growing media tech companies that were also acquired by Backlight and received strategic growth investment from PSG. All five companies are operating as business units as part of Backlight.

• ftrack is the creator of ftrack Studio, cineSync, and ftrack Review, the Emmy and Academy Award-winning production tracking, interactive media review, and team collaboration platforms for the creative industries. ftrack’s solutions are designed for producers, supervisors, artists, and pipeline developers to collaborate with anyone, anywhere.
• Iconik is a cloud-native, SaaS media management solution that is designed for users to share files from any storage, collaborate on video, and enrich media with AI for high searchability—all with great ease and the ability to scale to serve solo creators or large global teams.
• Celtx’s all-in-one solution for writing, planning, and managing media production is used by millions worldwide. Celtx provides pre-production planning software, including scriptwriting, storyboarding, shot-planning and budgeting, to in-house production teams, agencies, film schools and universities, game studios, and media & entertainment companies.
• Zype provides infrastructure for digital video with a cloud-based platform to manage and distribute enterprise-grade video across the web, mobile, TV, and social media. Offering both developer-friendly tools such as customizable APIs as well as turnkey solutions for OTT apps and linear/FAST channels, Zype’s SaaS solutions enable video creators or distributors to quickly build, launch and manage superior video products at scale.