Vuzit Archive

Philly-based Vuzit has announced a new round of angel funding today. The round was lead by Robin Hood Ventures and Innovation Philadelphia, and Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania also participated. The company notes that they will use the new funding to enhance its sales and marketing efforts as well as to patent their proprietary document technology.

We initially covered Vuzit when they presented at the DreamIT demo day last September.

Vuzit won the "Most Innovative Product or Service" from the Ben Franklin Emerging Business Awards competition earlier this year. I spoke with Vuzit co-founder Chris Cera who told me about some deals they are working on currently. I can’t share the details yet but the visibility from the deals should be large.

Unlike Scribd and Docstoc, Vuzit isn’t focusing on advertising so they aren’t pushing the content into the social services and working the SEO angle. Vuzit is focusing on the enterprise market and the security side of online document sharing. Vuzit offers a freemium model with prices ranging from free to $59.99/month.

They also note, "With Vuzit’s plans of a future document control system supporting Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPPA privacy requirements, Vuzit is primed to extend their current success into a whole new market."

Today I spent time at the DreamIT Ventures Funding Day in Philadelphia. The first company was Vuzit presented by founder Brent Matzelle. Vuzit is an online document viewer similar to Docstoc and Scribd. Vuzit can protect documents by preventing unauthorized copy and download functions. Vuzit appears to be focused on the enterprise business market.

Vuzit is currently serving 1,000 users and over 12,000 document requests per day. To-date the company has raised $350,000. Brent showed a slide of the competition and only included enterprise level applications — Docstoc/Scribd weren’t even mentioned.

During the Q&A, I asked about the comparison between Vuzit and Docstoc/Scribd. Brent replied that Docstoc/Scribd are about public sharing and Vuzit is about privacy and protection. He went on to say that the other companies have very basic features. This was a bit shocking considering all three companies basically offer the exact same product. A good slide for Brent to add would be a comparison of the three services – for example, Vuzit focuses on enterprise customers while Docstoc focuses on their public-facing repository.