100ms raises $20 million led by Alpha Wave Incubation

L-R 100ms founders Aniket Behera, Kshitij Gupta, Sarvesh Dwivedi

Live video-conferencing infrastructure startup 100ms has raised a Series A funding round of $20 million led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) to power the next generation of live video apps. The round also saw participation from Matrix Partners India and LocalGlobe and existing investors Accel and Strive.vc.

This investment comes nearly five months after the startup raised $4.5 million in seed funding from Accel and Strive.vc. It has raised a total of $24.5 million to date.

“Building and managing video infrastructure at scale is a non-trivial problem for most organisations” said 100ms CEO Kshitij Gupta, “Our goal is to make it easy for businesses of all sizes to deliver deeper-than-physical live video experiences within their products in less than half-dozen lines of code.”

Founded in 2020 by Gupta, Aniket Behera and Sarvesh Dwivedi, 100ms enables companies to add live video and audio capabilities to its mobile and web apps through software development kits (SDKs).

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It offers pre-built templates that help developers build virtual events, audio-rooms, webinars, classrooms, live shopping, game streaming and telehealth capabilities with a few lines of code. It charges companies on a pay-per-use basis depending on how they use the conferencing, recording and live streaming capabilities.

The startup said it would use the funds raised to help developers build and deploy enterprise-class video applications within a few hours.

“Video-based solutions will be a key driver in the development of B2B and B2C products in a multitude of verticals. By abstracting the complexities of video streaming, 100ms has created a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use product for companies to be able to add high-end, live engagement tools in a cost-effective manner” said Anirudh Singh, Managing Director at Falcon Edge's Alpha Wave Incubation.

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The founder trio previously worked at Walt Disney's streaming service Disney+ Hotstar while Gupta has also worked on building features at Meta that made Facebook Live more interactive.

100ms currently has customers such as WhiteHat Jr, Circle, Paytm Insider, Townscript, GetMega, Frontrow, and Kutumb.

"Whether it’s online fitness, e-learning, gaming, or shopping, we’re very early in the journey of video-first experiences and the 100ms team has built a great product with phenomenal early traction" said Pranay Desai, Principal, Matrix India.