WaveBreak aims to reinvest in staff

Wavebreak Media will use €400,000 raised in venture capital to hire 10 people.

Kernel Capital, through the Bank of Ireland Seed and Early Stage Equity Fund, has led the investment in CIT-based WaveBreak Media, a producer of “compelling visual” content.

CEO Sean Prior started the company after he developed a number of DVDs for the tourist market featuring footage from scenic parts of Ireland. Then he reassessed the value of his product.

“I realised the copyright of the footage was more valuable than the DVDs I was producing,” he said. “I sold the footage to Getty Images.”

WaveBreak employs 20 people at its offices in the Rubicon Centre on the CIT campus. It boasts a catalogue of more than 100,000 stock media files, which are sold through its website and via an extensive international distribution network of 60 agents, including some of the industry’s largest distributors, such as Getty Images and Corbis Motion. Clients include Dell, RTÉ, Fox Sports and MTV, and WaveBreak is experiences average customer download rates of 40,000 times per month globally.

Mr Prior said he enjoys seeing WaveBreak’s images used around the world. “I was in New York driving to the airport and I saw one of the biggest billboards I’d ever seen, showing one of our images,” he said. “I definitely got a kick out of that,” he said.

WaveBreak is moving into producing slow-motion video, and 3D images. It aims to hire a number of 3D animators to help processing images.

Operations director of Kernel Capital, Orla Rimmington, said Kernel is excited to support companies fit for expansion.

“Kernel Capital is delighted to support dynamic Irish companies like WaveBreak,” she said.