Pavonis Capital has announced that it has made a significant stake in the seed round in pioneering video start-up, StoryVine, Inc., which fully automates the video production process and can produce numerous, compelling, on-brand videos at very low prices. While this marks Pavonis' first technology company investment, StoryVine's founder also co-founded a previous internet offering, AGENCY.COM.

'We are thrilled to work with Pavonis as a partner, at this stage in our growth,' says Kyle Shannon, Chief Executive Officer of StoryVine. 'We've planned on real estate being a core vertical market and with Pavonis, we are now poised to move aggressively in that space.'

The StoryVine platform-which combines the best of professional video production with the scalability and authenticity of user-generated content, a new category that StoryVine calls 'Professional User-Generated-Content,' or 'ProUGC'-starts with a professionally produced video template and automatically inserts structured, user-generated content to create on-brand, professional-quality videos. The user-generated content is captured using StoryVine's Spotmade video-capture app-currently available for iOS devices (in private alpha-testing)-guide users, much like turn-by-turn instructions on modern GPS devices, to capture video, images and text. 'It's like having a virtual director guiding you along the storytelling process,' explained Mr. Shannon. It then tags those assets with metadata and stores them separately in the StoryVine engine to be managed and automatically assembled into the video template, allowing the creation of thousands of consistent, professional videos with incredible efficiency.

'Professional video production is hard, labor-intensive and unbelievably expensive. It is an industry ripe for disruption,' says Mark Kingston, managing partner of Pavonis, who will also be joining StoryVine's Board of Directors. 'We see incredible uses for this application in the real estate industry that we intend to integrate and commercialize within our suite of product offerings. StoryVine's technology and commitment to compelling content is the ideal combination to create the stories of buildings, markets, companies and agents at an unprecedented scale. When combined with our immersive technology and related tools, this will be a game-changer.'

IBM, one of StoryVine's earliest clients, is creating videos of employee best-practices from all over the company, an approach that would not have been possible with traditional methods. The ability to capture remote video without a dedicated crew, dramatic (at least 10-to-1) cost-savings, and the immediacy of full-automation allows companies like IBM to use video communications where it wouldn't have been possible prior to the StoryVine platform.

'Businesses know video is a valuable tool and demand for authentic communications is exploding, but those wanting to scale video production have historically faced poor options: professional video-high-quality, with message control, but expensive; user-generated video-cheap and scalable, but has little to no message control and it's often unwatchable,' says Shannon. 'These shortcomings are overcome by using StoryVine's Pro-UGC platform to produce videos offering the best of both worlds-compelling & on-brand and cost-effective & scalable.'