Kaltura, video platform secures US$ 20 Mn in funding

Kaltura, Inc., developer of the first and only open source online video platform, announced today that it has secured an additional $20 million in a round of financing led by new investors Nexus Venture Partners with participation from Intel Capital, existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures, and technology lender Silicon Valley Bank.

Over the last 18 months Kaltura's open-source video management platform has rapidly grown to become the most widely adopted solution in the market, far eclipsing the combined publisher-base of all proprietary online video platforms such as Brightcove. Serving more than 100,000 publishers, Kaltura's products and services cater to companies across all sectors with focus on four verticals - media companies, enterprises, educational institutions, and service providers. Users include Fox, Paramount, HBO, Warner Brothers, The Times of India, Best Buy, Texas Instruments, Coldwell Banker, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, NYU, Columbia University, and Siemens.

Organizations use Kaltura to enhance their websites, web-services, or web-platforms with advanced customized video, photo and audio functionalities with rich-media ingestion, encoding, management, publishing, delivery, distribution, engagement, monetization, and analysis. The platform supports delivery to PCs, mobile devices, tablets, TVs, and other connected devices, with expertise in all related technologies, including Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight. Kaltura's HTML5 Video library has become an industry standard, embraced by leaders such as Adobe and Wikipedia.

Kaltura sets itself apart from proprietary vendors by openly providing hundreds of APIs and the entire source code in order to enable customers, integrators, and developers to customize their own workflows and to develop their own distinct rich-media applications and plug-ins. The Kaltura Exchange is a vibrant marketplace that surfaces these applications along with ancillary products and services that are offered by 3rd parties. The platform and its Exchange are supported by a global developer community that already includes many thousands of registered members that help fuel an unparalleled pace of innovation. Kaltura offers the widest range of deployment options available. Customers can subscribe to Kaltura's commercial video platform as a hosted service (Kaltura'sSaaS Platform), license Kaltura's commercial video management software for on-premise or cloud-based hosting, or use Kaltura's Community Edition, downloadable for free under the AGPL License.

"Kaltura is disrupting the online video space in a similar way to how open-source Red Hat and MySQL have disrupted their fields of operating systems and databases," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman & CEO. "We are honored to have gained the support of Intel Capital and Nexus Venture Partners who have played an important role in the success of these two open-source giants. Kaltura's financial success and the premium investors that it attracts demonstrate once again that there is indeed no dissonance between doing good, and doing well."

Yekutiel added, "Kaltura is changing the game by tearing down the walled-garden approach around rich-media, fostering openness, embracing interoperability, and harnessing global innovation. The availability, flexibility, and extensibility of our system and the powerful community behind it are dramatically lowering the barrier for the creation and consumption of integrated rich-media, paving the way for a much richer web experience for all."

"We constantly survey both the online-video and the open source markets for promising investments, so we were delighted to find in Kaltura a company that is hugely successful by combining the best technology with a powerful open source business model," said Naren Gupta from Nexus Venture Partners, who also serves on the Board of Directors of open-source leader Red Hat. "Video is a powerful tool for enterprises and consumers and online video is rapidly being introduced into every website, web platform, and web service in the world. It is a fertile opportunity for a formidable success of an open-source leader like Kaltura."

In a related announcement at the Mobile World Conference, Intelunveiled today a series of investments in the mobility space, including the investment in Kaltura. Intel Capital's investment will help enhance the delivery of rich-media functionalities on tablets, mobile phones, and other connected devices, with a special emphasis on supporting the MeeGo mobile operating system and Intel's AppUp„¢ application store.

"There is significant demand to facilitate the handling of online video on three screens within customized work-flows in tightly integrated applications," said Lisa Lambert, vice president, Intel Capital. "Kaltura is optimally positioned to take full advantage of this opportunity with its open technology, impressive customer base, and strong developer community."

"Kaltura is a juggernaut. They're exceptionally well positioned to deliver online video at a time in the market when demand for online video is exploding, "said Maria Cirino, Managing Director of .406 Ventures. "It has been an exciting ride and we look forward to the next chapter with this innovative company led by a passionate group of world class entrepreneurs."

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