The latest win for Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s Mountain View, CA- and Cambridge, MA-based startup incubator, is Omnisio, a California Internet video startup that announced today that it’s been acquired by Google, which plans to fold it into YouTube. The companies didn’t report the purchase price, but TechCrunch is saying that it was in the neighborhood of $15 million.
Omnisio’s software lets users add text notes to online videos, mash together videos from different sources (including YouTube), and synchronize lecture videos with slide presentations. As a result of the acquisition, these capabilities will now likely be available directly to YouTube contributors and viewers.
Omnisio was launched in March by programmer-entrepreneurs Ryan Junee, Julian Frumar, and Simon Ratner, who all worked together at Palo Alto, CA-based network filtering company Sensory Networks. The Atherton, CA, startup participated in the Winter 2008 term of Y Combinator’s unique incubator program, which pays the living expenses of small groups of software startup founders who gather in Mountain View (during the winter) or Cambridge (during the summer) to hammer out their business plans and technology demonstrations, with advice from veteran entrepreneurs and programmers in Graham’s circle.
In exchange, Y Combinator gets a small amount of stock in each startup, usually between 2 percent and 10 percent. So Graham’s maximum potential earnings in the Omnisio deal would be around $1.5 million—not a bad return on the $5,000 per founder that the company typically spends on its incubator participants.
The Summer 2008 batch of Y Combinator companies will be showing off their wares at three Demo Days next month: one in Cambridge and two in Mountain View. Other Y Combinator companies that have achieved acquisitions include social bookmarking service Reddit (purchased by Conde Nast’s Wired division) and Auctomatic (purchased by Communicate.com), which makes software for managing online auction inventories.
