Video infrastructure provider Bitmovin has raised $25 million in Series C financing, led by Swisscom Ventures, the venture arm of the Switzerland telco.
Others participating in the funding round were Climb Ventures and existing investors Atomico, Highland Europe and Constantia New Business. The announcement brings Bitmovin’s total funding to $68 million to date.
Customers of San Francisco-based Bitmovin include Discovery Plus, WarnerMedia, BBC, RTL, FuboTV, DAZN, RedBull Media House, ClassPass, the New York Times and Hong Kong’s PCCW. Overall, the company says, it has more than 400 customers worldwide, including 120 broadcasters and TV networks.
“We see every media company, specifically in the U.S., changing to an OTT [over-the-top video] model,” Bitmovin founder and CEO Stefan Lederer said, adding that the company has seen 120% growth in video impressions during the pandemic.
According to Lederer, Bitmovin is cash-flow positive but “we saw the opportunity to double down on the next growth step.” The company looking at expanding its existing product lines — which comprise video encoding, a video player and analytics — and adding new product lines, potentially through M&A, he said.
Bitmovin’s biggest challenge is hiring engineering talent, Lederer said. There are “only a handful of really good video engineers,” even in Silicon Valley, and that “there’s a big fight for top talent.” The company currently has 155 employees worldwide.
Competitors include Conviva in video analytics; JW Player on the video-player side; and Amazon Web Services and Encoding in video encoding (although AWS is a “frenemy” — Bitmovin teams with the Amazon unit on the content delivery services front).
With the Series C funding, Swisscom Ventures investment partner Stefan Kuentz is joining Bitmovin’s board.“Bitmovin continues to set the pace for industry innovation, pushing video streaming to new heights while allowing new market entrants to compete with established players,” Kuentz said in a statement.
Founded in 2013, Bitmovin is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in Denver, Austria (Vienna, Klagenfurt), London, Berlin, Singapore and São Paulo, Brazil.
Bitmovin earlier this year received a Technology & Engineering Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for the development of a massive parallel-processing system to accelerate encoding speeds using cloud infrastructure.
