PeggyBank raises $500k with plans for tech upgrades, more marketing

PeggyBank has closed a $500,000 Series A round, company founder and CEO Jim Simon said in a phone interview. Although Simon declined to divulge specifics about the first outside funding his startup has taken …

PeggyBank has closed a $500,000 Series A round, company founder and CEO Jim Simon said in a phone interview. Although Simon declined to divulge specifics about the first outside funding his startup has taken on, he confirmed that two investors contributed to the round.

As we discussed in a story last September, Omaha-based PeggyBank converts customers’ legacy media (home movies, photos, slides and negatives) into digital content that is hosted online — in what’s called the “PeggyVault” — and sharable via social networking platforms, email and mobile devices. PeggyBank, which turns one year old in March, has grown to an 18-employee company that has more than 5,000 user accounts and uploads more than 3 terabytes of data per month.

Given that growth, it became clear to Simon, who has bootstrapped the company up to this point, that PeggyBank was becoming too big to bankroll himself. After some searching, he settled on investors that he believed were the right fit. “This particular investor group,” Simon said, “really liked what we were doing and believed in us.”

Simon says the capital infusion will be used to make upgrades to the PeggyVault, to ramp up marketing efforts and to bring aboard additional “people and equipment.”

Simon believes the PeggyVault, the online space for storing customers’ media, presents a major opportunity for innovation.

“Really what we want to do is do some pretty significant tech enhancements,” Simon said. “With that money we want to really develop the Vault. … We feel like the Vault itself is just a jewel and we can figure out really clever ways to make the Vault easier to use.”

Simon said the company plans to explore the possibility of strategic partnerships for better utilizing the contents of the Vault. 

“We envision a world where people will be able to access their home movies via Netflix just like they can any Hollywood movie,” he said. “You know, we’d like to take that Vault to the next level from a technology standpoint, so there’s some really cool development we’d like to move forward with.”

PeggyBank also plans to put the new funds to use on a more expansive marketing approach as it looks to get a leg up on its media conversion space competitors like iMemories and Memory Hub.

“We’ve been doing most of our marketing via social commerce to this point, and we want to move beyond that,” Simon said. “We think we can figure out some ways to do some paid search and do some other creative marketing.”

Beyond that, the money will be put toward the aforementioned people and equipment. Simon recognizes that those two will remain prominent needs because PeggyBank isn’t, as he puts it, “a pure technology play.” That said, the startup is always on the lookout for ways to streamline its processes and make its business more easily scalable. 

“For some of what we do there are some scalable enterprise solutions that exist — no doubt about it,” Simon said. “And we want to try to incorporate those as much as possible, and not just on the asset handling but in the way we communicate with customers.”

 

Credits: Photo of Simon from linkedin.com.

This story is part of the AIM Archive

This story is part of the AIM Institute Archive on Silicon Prairie News. AIM gifted SPN to the Nebraska Journalism Trust in January 2023. Learn more about SPN’s origin »

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One response to “PeggyBank raises $500k with plans for tech upgrades, more marketing”

  1. […] Feb. 2012, PeggyBank closed closed a $500,000 round. The company worked out of an office near 72nd and […]