ViVu, Inc., the company that creates solutions to transform the way people interact using video, announced that it has raised its Series A round of financing led by Inventus Capital Partners, and with participation from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Quest Ventures and serial entrepreneur Bill Carrico. The $3 million cash infusion will enable the company to bring its flagship video service to market, which includes business development and product marketing efforts.
“As an active participant in the emergence and growth of Silicon Valley and India, I see hundreds of investment opportunities each year,” said Kanwal Rekhi, co-founder and managing director at Inventus Capital Partners. “ViVu’s founding team is what’s first caught our attention but they sealed the deal by demonstrating a real solution for an existing market need and backing it up with early customer success. ViVu is on the path to redefining the way corporate communications and e-training are conducted today.”
ViVu developed a ground-breaking interactive communications technology that provides a solution for meeting organizers to create, publish and manage high-quality video events as effortlessly as with audio conference calls today. The technology enables live video participation from a PC, Macintosh or smart phone without any proprietary downloads and seamlessly integrates with most of the popular streaming video and conference solutions. ViVu is targeted at enterprises and is being used in a variety of ways, including: online meetings, sales presentations, training sessions, and large online events.
For example, next week, ViVu will power a live webcast from Digital Hollywood Fall from October 19th-22nd in Santa Monica, CA. The webcast will showcase speaker presentations in real-time, as well as allow virtual conference participation that includes the ability to interact with speakers, other attendees and remote participants using live video and Twitter. Join the conversation at http://www.digitalhollywoodlive.com/.
“Our vision for interactively connecting people via video, with an experience that’s equal to being there, is becoming a fast reality,” said Sudha Valluru, co-founder and CEO of ViVu. “Particularly with the realities of today’s economy and tight travel budgets, ViVu has proven to be a viable alternative to face-to-face interaction.”
Tony Perkins, founder and editor of AlwaysOn, said: “We used ViVu to power the live webcast of our AlwaysOn Stanford Summit this past July and the execution was absolutely flawless – bringing in an additional 10,000 virtual attendees from 80 different countries. ViVu’s innovative solution enabled our live audience to engage in real-time conversation with both users watching online from around the world and event attendees – a first-of-its-kind experience that proved to be a truly disruptive force for changing the way large events such as ours is hosted.”
The Solution
The ViVu video service is hosted in the cloud and delivered as interactive Video-as-a-Service (iVaaS). It already has successful deployments in several Fortune 500 companies for participative webinars, e-training and web video collaboration. The technology provides:
An integrated scheduling approach – Users can schedule and invite customers and associates to web video meetings as easily as making any other appointment. Using the ViVu portal, users can initiate a meeting on-the-fly or schedule one for later, a task made even easier by the solution’s seamless integration with Google Gmail and plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. A truly participative experience – ViVu’s unique auditorium view provides an efficient and productive interface for a virtual classroom feel, allowing the host to make a quick glance through all the participants and interact with them both individually and as a group. Comprehensive communication management – The presenter and viewers can interact with one another in a variety of ways (including audio and text) – with live video interaction being the most innovative and natural. The ViVu experience includes full desktop content and application sharing between participants for a more hands-on experience, a polling capability, as well as the ability to engage in interactive Q&A via chat or Twitter – complete with a screening capability to designate the comments public or private. An instant multimedia archive – A capability that allows for an end-to-end synchronized archive of all presented content (i.e. video, slides), along with participant interactions (i.e. Twitter messages). With a simple mouse click, a TiVo-like playback is created for viewing – just as if you were there. Valuable event analytics – After the event is over, the event portal provides access to the recorded event and associated data that includes each participant’s means of access, network domain, time spent in the session, and overall quality of experience. “Our initial seed investment in ViVu and continued support through the Series A round proves the strong belief we have in the company’s success,” said Tim Draper, managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. “With the domain experience of the team, laser-focus on quality and its vision for what’s possible in the web video collaboration space, ViVu brings a game-changing proposition to market that we believe to be a winner.”
The Team
ViVu was founded in 2008 by startup veterans from Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and a team of IIT graduates.
Sudha Valluru is co-founder, chairman and CEO of ViVu and brings over 20 years of experience in video, telecommunications and call centers. Most notably, he was vice president at NetDevices (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent) and architect of the first enterprise-quality IP video streaming server in the market at Precept (acquired by Cisco). Siva Kiran is co-founder and chief architect of ViVu, having boasting rights for being the youngest Java Certified Programmer in the world and writing several patents. Most recently, Kiran was with IBM Research; and prior to that, he worked at Alcatel-Lucent and Yahoo! Research. Joining Sudha and Siva on the Board of Directors will be John Dougery, managing director at Inventus Capital Partners; Joel Yarmon, associate at Draper Fisher Jurvetson; and Bill Carrico, founder of Bridge Communications (acquired by 3Com), Network Computing Devices and Precept and Packet Design. Pricing & Availability
The solution is available now, for a single user license starting at $49/month for unlimited online meetings and can be purchased at https://secure.vivu.tv/portal/buyNow.jsp. For a 30-day free trial, please register at https://secure.vivu.tv/portal/register.jsp. ViVu also offers both branded and on-premise versions of its service. Those interested in speaking with a ViVu sales representative for details can contact sales@vivu.tv or 408.792.7120.
ViVu, the ViVu logo are registered trademarks of ViVu Inc. in the United States and certain other countries. All other trademarks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners.
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