Live video infrastructure startup 100ms raises $20 mn in Series A funding

Live video infrastructure startup, 100ms on Friday announced its Series A funding round of $20 million led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI). AWI is backed by DisruptAD, ADQ’s venture platform, and managed by Alpha Wave Global. The round saw participation from Matrix Partners India and LocalGlobe, along with 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.

100ms aims to bring real-life interactions to the virtual world by providing 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, said the company statement.

“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, MD 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.”