Bordeaux-based api.video, a platform that helps build in-app video with a few lines of code, announced on Tuesday, December 13, that it has raised $12M (approximately €11.37M) in a Series A round of funding.
The round was led by MMC Ventures, with participation from Open Ocean, Blossom Capital, and Financiere Saint James.
Build, scale and operate video in your own apps
According to api.video, video is the most engaging and authentic digital format. High-speed networks and the commoditization of video output have accelerated. Businesses globally are trying to harness the potential of video-driven content for all product builders, especially those where video is not a major element of their operations. To do this, they must rely on a variety of third-party services or construct costly and time-consuming systems from the ground up using in-house teams.
This is where api.video steps in. Founded in 2019 by Cedric Montet, the cloud-based platform claims to remove time, cost and complexity barriers, and provide a customised end-to-end solution, driven by a single API. Due to this, its clients, like Bauer Media Group, Stoner Cats, and BNP Paribas, can quickly integrate strong, dependable, and high-quality video services within minutes. To handle diverse, specialised video operations, such as uploading and transcoding, developers no longer need to maintain several APIs, thanks to api.video.
Montet says, “We’re helping product builders join the video-first world. What is often thought of as a simple journey between ‘uploading’ and ‘click and play’, in fact, involves a variety of complex steps in the back-end. It is very inefficient for developers to build custom tooling in-house, especially when the video is not the core product offering of that organisation. Today’s fast-moving teams are better off investing developer energy and focusing on their core value and relying on api.video to handle all the complex parts.”
api.video provides dedicated video infrastructure, APIs, and SDKs that empower developers and decision-makers to control every aspect of their video experience. Whether the need is to integrate video into a mobile application, website, CMS, or software, the company says that the API delivers the “best” video quality.
Currently, api.video delivers more than 100,000 minutes of video every day and its API is used by more than 30,000 developers. The company has more than 500 clients in Europe.
Capital utilisation with a focus on sustainability
Since its €5M Seed funding in June 2020, api.video has developed its own infrastructure to offer high-quality video and assistance to a wide audience. This has accelerated customers’ time to market.
With the additional funding, api.video says it will further expand throughout Europe as part of its goal to create a worldwide EDGE infrastructure that prioritises video. It will expand the api.video team globally by hiring fresh talent. The funding will also go toward the introduction of additional features to serve more significant projects with specific needs such as advanced data and security.
The funding will also allow the API-first platform to concentrate on more sustainable initiatives, enabling the company to lessen the negative effects of video and its extensive data storage requirements. Due to the growing quantity of storage required for the enormous video files itself, as well as the energy used during the transcoding, streaming, and consuming stages, video is the digital service with the largest carbon footprint after crypto. According to a recent study, the amount of energy used by people watching YouTube has the equivalent carbon footprint of a small city.
Montet says, “This financing round will allow api.video to stay focused on providing a frictionless experience to our users and be recognised as the default video solution by small businesses and enterprises.”
01
From port to startup fort: How Lars Crama is ‘Making it Happen’ in Rotterdam