100ms raises $4.5 million from Accel and Strive.vc

Live video infrastructure platform,100ms, has raised $4.5 million in a seed round funding from Accel, along with the participation of Strive.vc.

100ms provides infrastructure that allows any company to add Zoom-style video conferencing inside their app within hours. It was founded by the team that built live video infrastructure, powering billions of video minutes a day on Facebook and Disney-Hotstar. The funds raised will be used to build the best video engineering team and product enhancement, creating 100s of templates of live use cases, simplifying video access for companies across the world.

In the pandemic, people’s lives moved to Zoom for studying, consulting doctors, meetings, even hanging out. However, users’ experience remained broken as consumers had to juggle between different apps and Zoom. As a result, developers rushed to try and add live video inside their apps to provide a seamless user experience. However, adding live video to apps with current developer platforms could be a long, cumbersome and expensive process.

The team at 100ms, Kshitij Gupta, Aniket Behera and Sarvesh Dwivedi, launched 100ms in October 2020 with a view to democratise access to live video infrastructure for everyone. Having operated in beta for a long period, they launched powerful but fully customisable SDKs that allows developers to add Zoom-quality video to their apps in hours, instead of months. They have already signed clients such as Paytm Insider, BookMyShow, Townscript and Circle.

The rapid growth is being driven by enterprises across industries who are unbundling Zoom - edtech, telehealth, retail, gaming, fitness, social networks and virtual events. Audio rooms - which are all the rage after clubhouse, didn’t exist as a category before the pandemic.

“Being a video engineer, I understand the complexity of adding live video at scale. For a long time, this infrastructure has only been available to very few developers. We started 100ms to build live video infrastructure for the world. Our SDKs are supported on all platforms, including IoS/ Android/ web and are equipped to build high quality video along with all the edge cases in just a few lines of code. Our infrastructure is designed to handle the scale and offers super low latency across the world," said Kshitij Gupta, co-founder and CEO, 100ms.

Aniket Behera, co-founder and COO, added: “Zoom is getting unbundled. Huge markets are being unlocked, which are now leveraging white labelled video/ audio - edtech, telehealth, gaming retail, fitness and audio rooms, among others. 100ms aims to be the infrastructure layer for all these industries.”

Abhinav Chaturvedi, Partner at Accel, said, “We believe all apps in the future will have video and audio embedded in them. 100ms is the best team to create the best in class developer product to enable this.”

"An open extendable platform, built by experts in audio/video streaming, and supported by a budding engaged community, instantly convinced us that the 100ms team is building a global-leading dev infra company,”said, Nikhil Kapur, Partner at STRIVE.vc.

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