Facebook and Disney execs raise $4.5m for 100ms to build live video infrastructure for the world

Live video infrastructure platform 100ms has announced a $4.5M seed round of funding led by Accel with participation from 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 at Facebook and Disney.

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 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.

Kshitij Gupta, Aniket Behera and Sarvesh Dwivedi solved these problems while building some of the world’s largest live video infrastructure deployments at Facebook and Disney. They 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 customizable software development kits (SDKs) that allow developers to add Zoom-quality video to their apps in hours, instead of months. 100ms has quickly signed up clients like Paytm Insider, BookMyShow Townscript, Circle among others and were voted #1 product of the day on producthunt.

“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/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,” commented Kshitij, co- founder and CEO, 100ms.

The market for live audio/video infrastructure services is forecast to grow from $4.2B in 2019 to $17.7B in 2024. The rapid growth is being driven by enterprises across industries who are unbundling Zoom – edtech, telehealth, retail, gaming, fitness, social networks, virtual events.
Audio rooms – which is all the rage after clubhouse, didn’t exist as a category before the pandemic.

Aniket, 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, audio rooms among others. 100ms aims to be the infrastructure layer for all these industries.”

The funds raised will be used to build the world’s best video engineering team and product enhancement creating 100s of templates of live use cases, simplifying video access for companies across the world.

On leading the investment round 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 who also participated in the investment round.