Austrian startup for streaming solutions bitmovin secures a seven-digit dollar investment from early stage fund Speedinvest, Constantia Industries AG as well as AWS and KWF. The money will help the Carinthia-based startup to establish itself on their target markets Europe and USA, grow their team and further develop their products.
Get to know your supporters
While bitmovin (find their startup pick here) wasn’t specifically looking for money, the close connection to the venture funds laid the foundation for the investment round. “We got a great support in business development and started off slowly with discussions. In the end the decision was very easy for us because we got to know each other over the past months and there is a good harmony with both, Speedinvest and Constantia,” Lederer said.
With the investment, bitmovin aims to continuously improve their products as well as accelerate their market entry and product distribution. So, in order to get things going their current team of eight shall be more than doubled.
Besides the money, the investors will also support the startup in business development and their market entry in the USA, which will be enhanced by Speedinvest and their presence in the USA. Moreover, the startup has several other endeavours for the near future. “We will be present on very important industrial fairs and will start innovative projects with our first customers but I don’t want to reveal too much at this moment,” Lederer said.
bitmovin’s adaptive streaming in a nutshell; Photo credit: Bitmovin
Highly on demand
With the rise of on demand giants and an increasing video consumption on different smart devices, also the streaming market is growing. American Netflix is one of these giants and will soon launch in the startup’s home country. “As a technology provider, our customers will react to the entry of Netflix. But we are closely connected to them as well as several online-video providers and our products easily keep pace with those of Netflix or Youtube. We enable our customers to provide the same or an even better quality. We are glad that the entry of Netflix as well as other streaming providers bring movement in the market and will constantly increase the quality of video offers,” Lederer explained optimistically.
Also Austria’s public service broadcasting, already having an own on demand service, tries to keep up with recent developments and currently announced to support Austrian streaming startup flimmit.
Streaming without delay or buffering
Bitmovin is a cloud-based transcoding and streaming service and was foundedin 2012 as a spin-off of the Alpe-Adria University. With their streaming client bitdash and the cloud-based platform bitcodin, bitmovin makes it possible to view videos on different smart devices, while the quality is dynamically adapting to the users bandwidth so videos won’t get stuck or buffer too long. Their supporters also include FFG, Netidee Initiative and the build! Gründerzentrum.
This story is brought to you in partnership with AplusB, a programme funded by FFG.
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