RiverSilica gets funding from Exfinity

RiverSilica Technologies, a Bengaluru-based video-streaming solutions provider, received funding from Exfinity Technology Fund. The size of the funding is reportedly in the range of Rs 10 crore ($1.5 million).

This is the second investment by Exfinity, incorporated in October 2013 and backed by former Infosys directors T V Mohandas Pai, V Balakrishnan, and former Wipro joint chief executive officer Girish Paranjpe, among others.

In June, Exfinity invested in Virtual Power Systems, a US-based start-up that provides technologies to reduce consumption of power by data centres, in a round which was also participated in by Vinod Dham, widely credited as inventor of the pentium chip.

Founded in 2010 by Jagannathan Balaji, a serial entrepreneur who has worked with leading technology companies such as IBM, Dell and Wipro, RiverSilica has developed a video streaming technology that can dynamically sense the bandwidth of the users' devices and accordingly compress the video content without impacting its quality. RiverSilica's main product line is PIXFIX, a patent-pending algorithm, which supports live video and on-demand video.

"While there has been an exponential growth in the consumption of video content in the country, the experience of consuming has not been that good because of bandwidth constraint. RiverSilica addresses the core issue of video steaming by dynamically sensing the bandwidth of the users' devices and accordingly reduce the beat rate of the video to suit the bandwidth," said Shailesh Ghorpade, managing partner, Exfinity.

RiverSilica addresses the Indian domestic market and Japan. With the current round of funding, the company expects to make a foray to other global markets for its PIXFIX product line, said Balaji.

Globally, US-based Harmonic Inc, Envivio and even Akamai are said to be leading players in the video streaming space.

This is the second round of funding by RiverSilica. In 2010, it had raised Rs 5 crore from Ojas Venture Partners, an early-stage venture fund floated by Nadathur S Raghavan, who is one of the co-founders of Infosys. Ojas did not participate in the current round of funding.