Heavy.com was believed to have raised around $12 million in December, but instead, sources say that $20 million in funding has been confirmed. The $20 million in funding from Polaris Ventures is Heavy.com’s fifth round of investment. Last year, Polaris had invested $10 million in Heavy.com and with this new round of funding, Heavy.com plans on expanding internationally. Today, Heavy.com has a good Alexa rank at 1,166 and a PageRank at 7/10.
Heavy.com, the NYC based video company is known for its humorous video collection such as Superficial Friends, a news coverage program called Heavy News, Worst Music Videos, and a parody of VH1’s Behind the Music, Behind the Worst Music. Heavy.com had announced that their 2006 revenues had grown 350% from the previous year and by looking at the homepage, it appears that Cingular and Microsoft have been promoting products along with the movie, Snakes on a Plane.
While I believe that the website is fascinating and creative, I found myself not thoroughly impressed by the load time. Most of the website is built on Adobe Flash and Java Applets. The Flash loader seems to have some minor bugs. The first time I visited the website, Heavy.com worked completely fine for me, but when I visited the homepage again, the Flash pre-load scenes seemed to freeze up and then finally load up at a slow pace. When testing the load time speed, I was using a reliable, wireless T1 connection. I would blame part of the slow load time on the Applet that is being used.
Heavy.com was founded in 1998 by David Carson and Simon Assaad. Both of the founders also founded the Fuse Network TV channel with CableVision Systems Corporation. Wikipedia has an extensive biography on Heavy.com as well. Heavy.com has a corporate background page, but it is currently offline.
