Qwilt raises $25m
June 25, 2015
Qwilt the provider of open caching and online video delivery solutions, announced the close of a $25 million Series D funding round. This strategic round, led by Disrupt-ive with a $16 million investment, includes new funding from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and continued funding from Cisco Investments. Existing investors Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker LLC and Redpoint Ventures also contributed to the round. The funds, which bring Qwilt’s total capital raised to $65 million, will be used to scale the company, including the acceleration of its go-to-market strategy and support for Tier 1 network operator deployments worldwide. The company will also use the funds to support, enhance and extend its flagship open cache product, the Qwilt Video Fabric solution.
“There’s a fundamental shift in how online video is consumed today given the proliferation of mobile devices and emergence of new streaming business models. Qwilt’s impressive team—with extensive expertise in both networking and storage—has created game-changing technology to solve the challenges presented by this new world order of streaming video,” said Tal Barnoach, general partner at Disrupt-ive. “Qwilt is a strong fit with our investment thesis as a late stage company with disruptive technology that can scale globally.”
The growth of streaming video shows no signs of slowing. Fixed broadband and mobile network operators across the globe are already struggling with extraordinary consumer demand. A recent Cisco VNI report reveals that Internet Protocol video will represent 80 percent of all traffic globally by 2019, up from 67 percent in 2014. The answer for network operators can be found in a new, open architecture for streaming video, which pushes content to the network edge, close to consumers, through open caching. Qwilt has been an innovator in open caching solutions since the company’s inception.
Qwilt provides the only solution for a flexible network architecture that can both scale to support future increases in demand for over-the-top (OTT) video and enable new monetisation business models for network operators. Qwilt’s solution is 100 percent software-based, running on commodity, off-the-shelf hardware. Qwilt’s open cache software architecture is designed to deploy easily, scale effectively and fully leverage the NFV/SDN environments being implemented by network operators worldwide.