Magisto

A father who had no time to edit videos

Magisto was founded in 2009 under the name SightEra by Oren Boiman, who served as CEO, and Alex Rav-Acha, who served as chief technology officer. According to Wikipedia, Boiman studied computer science at Tel Aviv University and went on to research computer vision at the Weizmann Institute. The starting point was personal: the long time it took him to edit videos of his daughter. The idea was to let the computer do this work.

How the automatic editing worked

The service launched to the public in September 2011 as a web app. The user uploaded raw footage, chose a title and a soundtrack, and the system edited a short video for them. According to Wikipedia, the company's image analysis technology looked for the interesting parts of the footage: it detected faces, animals, landscapes, action sequences and motion, and also analyzed speech and audio. It joined the selected clips into one video with music and effects. This is computer vision work, not a graphic filter. The iPhone app launched at CES 2012, and the Android version in August 2012.

Users, awards and funding

According to company figures quoted in Wikipedia, in March 2013 the service had 5 million users, and by February 2014 already 20 million. Google included the app in its list of the best apps of 2013, and the company won first place in the Israeli startup competition Technonomy3. In 2014 it ranked ninth on the Deloitte Israel Technology Fast 50 list, and in 2016 Deloitte named it the seventh fastest-growing company in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. In October 2013 the company raised $13 million from Qualcomm and SanDisk. Over time its center of gravity shifted to small businesses that need marketing videos: according to Crunchbase News, most of its revenue growth in 2018 came from business subscriptions.

The Vimeo acquisition

In April 2019 Vimeo bought Magisto. The terms of the deal were not officially published; according to an estimate by sources close to the deal quoted in Globes, Vimeo paid about $200 million. At the time of the acquisition, according to the announcement, the company had 100 million users and more than 75 employees in offices in Ness Ziona and California, and had raised $35 million since its founding; Crunchbase News counted about $23 million in venture capital. According to Crunchbase News, about 90% of the employees were in Israel. Vimeo explained that it wanted to use the technology to let small businesses produce video without a production team.

What is left of Magisto

In January 2026 Calcalist reported that Vimeo was laying off most of its employees in Israel and, by its estimate, preparing to close its local operations, which had been built on the acquisitions of Magisto and Wibbitz. At the end of 2025 Vimeo itself was acquired by the Italian company Bending Spoons. Magisto's web address now redirects to Vimeo's video editor. This is how one of the first consumer apps for automatic editing became a component in another company's product.