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.

SaaS Firm for Solar Infra SenseHawk Raises $5.1 Mn in Funding led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI)

• Funds raised to Enhance Efficiency in the Development, Construction and Operation of Solar Power Plants.
• Alpha Wave Incubationand SAIF Partners to Lead its Second Institutional Round.
• Funding to be Used for Product Development and Expanding SenseHawk Teams in North America, Middle East and North Africa .

SenseHawk, a SaaS company that helps customers develop, build and operate solar and other infrastructure sites through superior insights, announced today that it has raised $5.1 million in Series A1 funding. The investment round was led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI), a $300m venture fund managed by Falcon Edge Capital, a leading global alternative asset manager, and backed by ADQ, one of the largest regional holding companies based in Abu Dhabi. Existing investor SAIF Partners also participated with a follow-on investment.

SenseHawk’s cloud-based platform and application modules solve several challenges in the development, construction and operation of solar sites. Its application modules enable solar companies to reduce costs, enhance workforce productivity and improve solar site performance leveraging sophisticated AI and machine learning models.

The SenseHawk platform is used by over 80 customers to analyze over 28 GW of solar assets in 15 countries, and the company is focused on expanding its offerings and customer base as the world increasingly moves to renewable energy. Global installed solar capacity is expected to increase from the current installed base of 600GW to 3000 GW worldwide in 2030. Moreover, SenseHawk is already expanding its market by serving customers in road infrastructure, power transmission and construction industries, and deepening its suite of offerings beyond solar.

The application modules on the SenseHawk platform support site and terrain management, construction monitoring, operations, thermography, work management and file organization. A mobile app extends the power of the platform and brings data to field techs so they have all the information they need at their fingertips. The mobile app also supports onsite navigation, enabling users to easily navigate to allocated tasks on sites that can be 1000s of acres in size.

Be it a developer, EPC, O&M contractor, asset owner, independent engineer or anyone else that works on a solar project, collaboration is easy using the SenseHawk platform and application modules.

As part of this investment from AWI, SenseHawk will expand its presence to Abu Dhabi and use the Emirate as a global base for international expansion while also targeting the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and other global markets. SenseHawk will also build a world-class team of data scientists, product managers and engineers located in Abu Dhabi.

“The investment through Alpha Wave Incubation provides strategic access to the MENA market in addition to powering the ongoing development of our software platform. The follow-on investment by SAIF Partners is a validation of our direction and reaffirms their commitment to be a long-term partner to the startups they invest in,” said Swarup Mavanoor, CEO and co-founder of SenseHawk. “Solar construction is on a fast trajectory and this new funding enables us to continue to support designers, builders and operators of this critical form of renewable energy."

“SenseHawk has sophisticated technology, strong global traction and a leadership team with deep experience in the solar industry. We are excited to back an industry-leading AI-first SaaS company which brings about step-function increases in performance, productivity and cost efficiencies for their customers. Its platform offers immense application to the UAE and the GCC’s already large and burgeoning renewable energy sector,”

said Anirudh Singh, managing director at Alpha Wave Incubation.

“Over the last two years, we have seen SenseHawk build a best-in-class platform to serve the entire solar lifecycle,” said Mayank Khanduja, managing director, SAIF Partners. “Their marquee global customers are a testament to the power of the platform. We are excited to reaffirm our commitment to SenseHawk in this round."

“The SenseHawk platform uses a microservices architecture that enables us to easily build and integrate tools that can serve both technical and business processes in the solar industry,” said Saideep Talari, CTO of SenseHawk. “Our goal is to build a single solution to fill all the software needs of our solar industry customers."

About SenseHawk

SenseHawk, co-founded in 2018 by SwarupMavanoor and Rahul Sankhe, is a leader in AI-powered software for the solar site lifecycle. The company offers a powerful cloud-based platform and a completely integrated set of applications that support everything from solar plant design and construction to operation and maintenance. SenseHawk software has delivered data analytics for more than 28 GWs of solar assets across 15 countries worldwide. The company is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area and has offices in India. For more information, please go to www.sensehawk.com.

About Alpha Wave Incubation

Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) is a $300m venture fund managed by Falcon Edge Capital and backed by ADQ. AWI has a dedicated team across London, Bangalore and Abu Dhabi. The fund invests in early stage tech-enabled, disruptive start-ups in India and Southeast Asia. In addition to providing outstanding founders with early-stage capital, AWI offers access to an unrivaled set of support mechanisms for business-building, while also helping companies expand globally and open up new markets in the GCC/MENA region and beyond. ADQ is one of the region’s largest holding companies with a broad portfolio of major enterprises spanning key sectors of Abu Dhabi’s diversified economy.