Originally starting as a fourth-year design project at the University of Waterloo, cofounders Michael Litt, Devon Galloway, Cliffton Moore and Edward Wu launched the company in August 2011.

On November 17, 2011, Vidyard announced $1.65 million in seed funding from investors including Softech VC, YouTube Co-founder Jawed Karim, Y Combinator (company), and GMail creator Paul Buchheit.

[1] Michael Litt was going into his last year of school while he was creating short explanation videos for companies along with co-founder Devon Galloway.

A majority of their clients were putting their videos online with YouTube and Vimeo, but were complaining about both products.

While brainstorming ideas for his end-of-curriculum design project, Michael Litt decided to build Vidyard, to address the video hosting issues that his clients were having.