[Funding alert] Live video infrastructure startup 100ms raises $4.5M led by Accel

Live video infrastructure platform 100ms on Tuesday said it raised a seed round of $4.5 million led by Accel, with participation from Strive VC. 

100ms — founded by the team that built live video infrastructure at Facebook and Disney-Hotstar — provides infrastructure that allows any company to add Zoom-style video conferencing inside their app within hours, the company said in a statement.

The startup will use the funds raised to build the "world’s best video engineering team and product enhancement, creating hundreds of templates of live use cases, simplifying video access for companies across the world," the company said.

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Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, people 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 a live video feature inside their apps to provide a seamless user experience. However, adding live video to apps with current developer platforms is a long, cumbersome, and expensive process. Current developer platforms that enable live video take months to integrate. And video still doesn’t work at Zoom-quality, the startup said in a statement.

To solve these problems, Kshitij Gupta, Aniket Behera, and Sarvesh Dwivedi launched 100ms in October 2020 to democratise access to live video infrastructure for everyone.

“Being a video engineer all my life, 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, and 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.

Having operated in beta for a long period, the startup launched powerful but fully customisable SDKs that allows developers to add Zoom-quality video to their apps in hours, instead of months. It has signed up clients, including Paytm Insider, BookMyShow, Townscript, and Circle.

Aniket Behera, Co-founder and COO, said, "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."