Live video conferencing infrastructure startup 100ms has raised $20 million in Series A funding.
The startup was established in 2020 after the founders were working at Disney+ Hotstar in India. They began work on a feature that would enable people in India to watch live matches together. “We decided to build a feature, which enabled users to watch matches on the app, and have video calls with their friends to enjoy the match,” 100ms Co-Founder and CEO Kshitij Gupta says.
“We researched the solutions available on there and chose one of the existing video SDK providers to do that; it took us four months to get the product working,” Gupta says. “And that is when it all started. We were like no, in this new world, where most experiences are going to be through live videos, it should not take four months to build such platforms.”
That challenge inspired the team at 100ms to build live video infrastructure to allow companies to add Zoom-like video conferencing to their apps. 100ms took about nine months to build that infrastructure product, but now companies can integrate, test, and go live with their live video conferencing solution in less than a week.
“Most companies shy away from building this technology because it is very complex,” Gupta says. “We are targeting any business trying to embed video inside their application. It could be an edtech company doing online classes, a health tech companies who is doing telehealth calls, or something else.”
Since August 2021, over 2,200 businesses have used 100ms live video infrastructure.
The startup has experienced twenty times growth over the last quarter as demand continues to rise. “I think the reason why a lot of this acceleration has happened is that we reduce integration time,” Gupta admits. “We also want to build template models that companies can use to customize the live events for a more real-world experience. For us, we feel that this will be the beginning of our metaverse journey.”
100ms will use the funding to expand the team, hire more video engineers, and continue to expand the capabilities of the current product. The Series A funding round was led by Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation, with participation from Matrix Partners India and LocalGlobe and existing investors Accell and Strive.vc. 100ms has raised $24.5 million in funding so far.