As any expe­ri­enced social media man­ag­er can tell you, when a two-year-old social start­up man­ages to raise $13 mil­lion in invest­ment, it’s prob­a­bly doing some­thing seri­ous­ly right. Like, for exam­ple, New York-based Mag­is­to, cre­ators of an inge­nious social video edit­ing app, which has just bagged pre­cise­ly that prince­ly sum, cour­tesy of a fund­ing round led by Qual­comm Ven­tures and San­disk. Oth­er par­tic­i­pants includ­ed exist­ing investors Li Ka Shing’s Hori­zons Ven­tures and Mag­ma Ven­ture Partner.

Video sto­ry­telling the intel­li­gent way

But what, the intrigued social media man­ag­er will be ask­ing, has attract­ed hard-nosed investors to Mag­is­to? Well for one thing, its growth has been phe­nom­e­nal: in the space of just two years, it’s signed up in excess of 13 mil­lion users, all of them enthralled by its addic­tive “video sto­ry­telling” app.

The app is lit­tle short of a slice of heav­en for every­one who hates video edit­ing. And that prob­a­bly means every­one. Magisto’s pro­pri­etary algo­rithms use cut­ting edge Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy to do the don­key work.

Users sim­ply touch the “Select a gallery” but­ton on their smartphone’s touch­screen, pick the videos they’d like to be edit­ed (and select a sound­track to play along to them) and then touch the onscreen “Make My Video” but­ton. The app ana­lyzes the videos (its algo­rithms, to all intents and pur­pos­es, under­stand them) — a data crunch­ing process which enables it to select the best bits, and edit them together.

As the web­site claims, it con­verts your plain video into an “awe­some, edit­ed and pro­duced movie”, which can then be shared on social net­works (it does the same for still images, too, con­vert­ing them into beau­ti­ful slideshows).

Untapped poten­tial

Oren Boiman, Magisto’s co-founder and CEO, wants to make it eas­i­er for peo­ple to sal­vage and share the vast amount of video they leave lying fal­low on their smart­phones because they think it isn’t good enough to show. In an email exchange with TechCrunch, he wrote:

“Not [even] 1% of this mate­r­i­al has ever left its SD card. If Mag­is­to can mobi­lize a few per­cent of this huge data, inter­net will be entire­ly dif­fer­ent and it will shift the focus onto what is what actu­al­ly impor­tant to us, our life expe­ri­ences, our shared mem­o­ries, our stories.”

Qual­comm Ven­tures and San­disk, evi­dent­ly agree. And so will most social media managers.