Live Video Infrastructure Platform 100ms Raises $20 Mn in Funding Led By Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI)

Live video infrastructure startup announces an update that will help empower businesses to deploy enterprise-grade live video apps in hours.

• Beyond Zoom: 100ms is enabling product creators to add live video interactions for online classrooms, virtual events, audio rooms, online communities, telehealth, and more
• Traction: Hot on the heels of the $4.5m seed round in October 2021, 100ms reports 20x growth in product usage in the last quarter

Live video infrastructure startup, 100ms, today announced their Series A funding round of $20M led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI). AWI is backed by DisruptAD, ADQ’s venture platform, and managed by Alpha Wave Global. The round is joined by Matrix Partners India and LocalGlobe, along with participation from existing investors Accel and Strive.vc.

“Zoom and similar products helped us through the surge in digital adoption. We are missing one very important fact though - real 1:1 experiences cannot always be boxed into Zoom video tiles. Our belief is, going forward all companies will embed video experiences into their apps. 100ms provides the best-in-class infrastructure to power these video experiences.”, shares Abhinav Chaturvedi, Partner at Accel, on the continuation of the partnership from the seed stage.

“Video-based solutions will be a key driver in the development of B2B and B2C products in a multitude of verticals. By abstracting the complexities of video streaming, 100ms has created a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use product for companies to be able to add high-end, live engagement tools in a cost-effective manner. The market for this is global and through its differentiated GTM, 100ms is poised to be the market leader in this space” Anirudh Singh, Managing Director at Falcon Edge's Alpha Wave Incubation, commented on leading the round.

With customers like WhiteHat Jr, Circle, Paytm Insider, Frontrow, and Kutumb, 100ms announced that it has witnessed over 20X growth in usage metrics over the last quarter. With this round of funding, the company aims to help developers build and deploy enterprise-class video applications in hours.

"Mainstream video conferencing solutions are good enough, but not best-in-class for someone building a video-first business. Whether it’s online fitness, e-learning, gaming, or shopping, we’re very early in the journey of video-first experiences and the 100ms team has built a great product with phenomenal early traction. We’re excited to partner with Kshitij and Aniket in building a video-first future." said Pranay Desai, Principal, Matrix India.

"Building and managing video infrastructure at scale is a non-trivial problem for most organizations”, said Kshitij Gupta, CEO at 100ms and former VP, Engineering at Disney-Hotstar. “Our goal is to make it easy for businesses of all sizes to deliver deeper-than-physical live video experiences within their products in less than half-dozen lines of code."

About 100ms

100ms aims to bring real-life interactions to the virtual world by providing world-class developer tooling for live video. Founded by engineers that built the video infrastructure at Facebook and Disney, 100ms’s vision is to build rich, bespoke, and deeper-than-physical experiences for businesses and people.

For more information, visit https://100ms.live or follow @100mslive.

Video Infrastructure Platform 100ms Raises $4.5 Mn Led by Accel

• Investors: Funding round by Accel and Strive.vc to build the world’s best live video engineering team and scale the platform
• Opportunity: Founded by ex-Facebook and Disney execs to transform video experience in apps as they tap a $17.7B Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) market
• Growth: 100ms is working with brands in edtech, gaming, fitness, telehealth, virtual events among others to create quick video integrations

Live video infrastructure platform 100ms has announced a $4.5M seed round of funding led by Accel with participation from Strive.vc. 100ms provides infrastructure that allows any company to add Zoom-style video conferencing inside their app within hours. It was founded by the team that built live video infrastructure powering billions of video minutes a day at Facebook and Disney-Hotstar. 

The funds raised will be used to build the world’s best video engineering team and product enhancement creating 100s of templates of live use cases, simplifying video access for companies across the world.

In the pandemic, people’s lives moved to Zoom for studying, consulting doctors, meetings, even hanging out. However, users’ experience remained broken as consumers had to juggle between different apps and Zoom. As a result developers rushed to try and add live video inside their apps to provide a seamless user experience. However, adding live video to apps with current developer platforms is a long, cumbersome and expensive process. Current developer platforms that enable live video take months to integrate. And video still doesn’t work at Zoom-quality.

Kshitij Gupta, Aniket Behera and Sarvesh Dwivedi solved these problems while building some of the world’s largest live video infrastructure deployments at Facebook and Disney-Hotstar. They launched 100ms in October 2020 with a view to democratise access to live video infrastructure for everyone.

Having operated in beta for a long period, they launched powerful but fully customizable SDKs that allows developers to add Zoom-quality video to their apps in hours, instead of months. They have quickly signed up clients like Paytm Insider, BookMyShow Townscript and Circle, and were voted #1 product of the day on producthunt.

The market for live audio/video infrastructure services is forecast to grow from $4.2B in 2019 to $17.7B in 2024. The rapid growth is being driven by enterprises across industries who are unbundling Zoom - edtech, telehealth, retail, gaming, fitness, social networks, virtual events. Audio rooms - which is all the rage after clubhouse, didn’t exist as a category before the pandemic.

“Being a video engineer all my life, I understand the complexity of adding live video at scale. For a long time, this infrastructure has only been available to very few developers. We started 100ms to build live video infrastructure for the world. Our SDKs are supported on all platforms including ios/android/web and are equipped to build high quality video along with all the edge cases in just a few lines of code. Our infrastructure is designed to handle the scale and offers super low latency across the world," commented Kshitij Gupta, co- founder and CEO, 100ms.

Aniket Behera, co-founder and COO added: “Zoom is getting unbundled. Huge markets are being unlocked which are now leveraging white labelled video/audio - edtech, telehealth, gaming retail, fitness, audio rooms among others. 100ms aims to be the infrastructure layer for all these industries.”

On leading the investment round Abhinav Chaturvedi, Partner at Accel, said, “We believe all apps in the future will have video and audio embedded in them. 100ms is the best team to create the best in class developer product to enable this.”

"An open extendable platform, built by experts in audio/video streaming, and supported by a budding engaged community instantly convinced us that the 100ms team is building a global-leading dev infra company,”said, Nikhil Kapur, Partner at STRIVE.vc who also participated in the investment round.

100ms provides infrastructure that allows any company to add Zoom-style video conferencing inside their app in hours. The founding team built live video infrastructure powering billions of minutes a day at Facebook and Disney. To explore 100ms, please visit: www.100ms.live or follow on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.