Bitmovin has today announced a $10.3 million (USD) Series A round led by Atomico, presenting funds intended to accelerate the development of video playback technologies for existing and new platforms, including 360-degree video for virtual reality (VR). Angel investors include David Helgason, founder of Unity, Chris Kaiser, former VP of Engineering at Netflix and YouTube, and Edward Kozel, former CTO of Cisco, have all participated in the round, together with the existing investors Dawn Capital, Speedinvest, and Y Combinator.
Founded by the co-creators of the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard, which is used by industry leaders like Netflix and YouTube and currently accounts for 50% of US peak internet traffic, Bitmovin aims to pave the way for emerging video technologies, estimating that by 2020 80% of internet traffic will be given over to video in all its forms, including VR and 360-degree video.
Bitmovin currently provides a cloud-based video encoding service that is reportedly 100 times faster than real-time. It also offers the Bitmovin HTML5 player that plays video using the MPEG-DASH and HLS format on a range of platforms, including desktop, mobile, Smart TVs and VR headsets, counteracting the devaluation of Flash in modern web browsers.
Stefan Lederer, CEO of Bitmovin, said: “Bitmovin allows content providers to stream high-quality videos on any platform, with the lowest buffering times and highest quality performance, while making it as easy as possible for developers to build services using our API. We are not just solving today’s problems. We also offer the best infrastructure for virtual reality streaming and 360 degree video, which means we are helping developers and entrepreneurs offer the latest in video technology to increasingly tech-savvy consumers.
“This latest round of investment will help us to continue improving our product. At a time when net neutrality has risen up the political agenda, we are determined to increase the speed and quality of video playback on any platform whilst also reducing the bandwidth needed to power the technology. That is why we have been able to secure investment from one of the best SaaS VCs in the market and from some of the most impressive video and VR experts and Angels.”
Bitmovin, Inc. is currently based in Palo Alto, CA, and Klagenfurt, Austria. Given the company’s concentration on web based technologies – a rapidly growing area of video technology development – more is expected from Bitmovin in near future. VRFocus will keep you updated with all the latest details.