Ooyala has closed a $10 million series C funding round and will be investing heavily to grow the company fast globally. Current investors, including Sierra Ventures, participated in the round. New investor, Rembrandt Venture Partners, led the funding investment, and Sik Rhee, General Partner at Rembrandt, will be joining the Ooyala Board of Directors. Since Ooyala launched in April 2007, the company has raised $20 million.I spoke with Bismarck this past summer and he told me that his company has seen tremendous growth internationally with 50% of their new monthly recurring revenue coming from international markets. Ooyala currently has over 500 customers in over 20 different countries sees great opportunity in international growth markets for new customers as Bismarck pointed out:
"We've gone through the top Quantcast one million sites and we've looked at kind of where the industry is headed and we look at our business and we think we can have up to 300,000 customers today. Like the current market for online video platforms is somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 customers. These aren't the self-serve free YouTube customers these are people who are willing to pay for platforms."
As part of their international marketing plans Jay Fulcher, Ooyala CEO and Sean Knapp, Co-founder & CTO are currently at Streaming Media Europe, in London, this week presenting on two sessions about Online Video Publishing Platforms and Will the Cloud Rain on the CDNs' Parade? They'll also be interviewing sales and marketing candidates for key roles in both the UK, mainland Europe and Asia.In a saturated online video platform market that seems to change daily, Ooyala differentiates itself as "the intelligent video platform" in comprehensiveness, by providing a single, end-to-end platform with an integrated, intuitive interface with viewer insight and advanced monetization tools. Ooyala reaches over 50 million unique users a month via their player from their 500 media and non-media customers globally. With the new funding Ooyala will be focused on aggressively growing the company both in the US and internationally. In 2010, their focus will be product development on new ways for content owners to monetize their content.
As far a biggest competitors, Ooyala says that most often they compete against the over 10,000 homegrown implementations of video that are in the top 100,000 Quantcast sites. Outside of that, they believe that Brightcove is next closest competitor.
In light of the recent acquisition of The Feedroom by KIT Digital and other online video platforms rebranding and refocusing their business models, Ooyala had this to say about the outlook for 2010:
"For 2010, many of the small providers like Delve Networks, Episodic.com, Twistage will fall by the way-side. Companies that already have some level of success but not very much technology, like Fliqz and Multicast, will be consolidated into a company that primarily provides professional services. Depending on what Brightcove’s investors plan to do, they may also be taken out in the next 6-12 months."Prior to their funding news release, Ooyala also announced today that it has released native support of closed captioning. See their blog post and customer example here.
