Social media man­agers and con­tent man­agers inter­est­ed in social media suc­cess sto­ries might do well to check out the impres­sive rise of Keek, the Toron­to-based social video shar­ing start­up, which has just secured new fund­ing total­ing $18 million.

Gal­lop­ing popularity

This lit­tle firm appears to be doing a lot right.  Investors cer­tain­ly seem to think so.  And so, evi­dent­ly, do its users: their num­bers have soared from just a few thou­sand in the months after its launch to 15 mil­lion unique users per month mak­ing 75 mil­lion vis­its per month.

In the last month alone, the com­pa­ny has acquired 6 mil­lion new sign-ups at a rate of around 200,000 a day.  It’s enough to make the aver­age com­mu­ni­ty man­ag­er go green with envy.

The lat­est fund­ing round was led by AGF Invest­ments, Plaza­corp Ven­tures and Pine­tree Cap­i­tal, with addi­tion­al invest­ment from Cran­son Cap­i­tal. But what’s per­suad­ing these investors to reach for their checkbooks?

For­get enter­tain­ment.  Video is communication

Those num­bers speak vol­umes.  The startup’s unique­ness lies in its use of short videos (36 sec­onds max­i­mum) as a means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion rather than sim­ply enter­tain­ment.  Things real­ly start­ed to take off last spring, when Keek moved from being web-only to mobile com­pat­i­ble.  With its release of mobile apps for Android and Apple gad­gets last year, Keek now boasts four mil­lion user-gen­er­at­ed movie clips being post­ed every month.

While com­peti­tors like Social­cam and Klip have failed to take off in the same way, Keek’s empha­sis on fast, sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion through video – sans cum­ber­some edit­ing and entertainment/feature over­load – has paid off hand­some­ly.  Although its pop­u­lar­i­ty has grown from the base up, it now includes some famous US celebri­ties among its users, like Kim Kar­dashi­an and her sis­ters, not to men­tion 2 Chainz and Adam Lambert.

CEO and founder Isaac Raichyk believes Keek’s unique angle on mobile video shar­ing is the key to its suc­cess.  He said:

“It’s a way for peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate with their friends, with the fol­low­ers, with their fans, or who­ev­er, but it’s a way to com­mu­ni­cate.  We don’t pro­vide any beau­ti­fi­ca­tion fil­ters, no video edit­ing, just point; shoot; upload; communicate.”

Much of the $18 mil­lion will be plowed in to a mas­sive infra­struc­ture expan­sion, which Raichyk says is cru­cial to his company’s inter­na­tion­al growth.  Keek could well become the Insta­gram of social video sharing.