Vidyo Thursday confirmed it had closed a $22.5 million round of Series D financing, the latest growth milestone for the fast-rising videoconferencing upstart.
QuestMark Partners led the Series D round, which also saw participation from current Vidyo investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures and Four Rivers Group. Vidyo has closed about $96 million in total financing since its 2005 founding.
"Vidyo is fortunate to have outstanding investors who understand the architectural shift occurring in the market today and customers who will no longer pay the excessive cost of traditional telepresence when they can truly have more for less," said Ofer Shapiro, Vidyo's CEO and co-founder, in a statement.
Vidyo in recent years has emerged as a scrappy challenger to major video vendors like Cisco and Polycom with a software-based platform it claims offers flexible HD videoconferencing for a fraction of the price of traditional telepresence endpoints. Among its recent releases was VidyoPanorama, a multi-screen telepresence system that can enable up to nine screens delivering 1080 at 60 fps video.
Vidyo's products use its Adaptive Video Layering (AVL) technology to optimize video quality for each participants environment, and those participants use general data networks and the Internet for connectivity rather than a dedicated QoS network. The company has sought to attract video VARs and integrators as well as software developers and telecom service provider partners.
Vidyo's growth and good notices have also attracted a range of veteran video and networking executives to its stable, including Ashish Gupta, a former key member of Microsoft's Lync team, now Vidyo's CMO and senior vice president of corporate development, and Jim Fairweather, the former vice president, worldwide sales for HP's Visual Collaboration unit and vice president, North America & U.S. sales at Polycom, and now Vidyo's vice president, worldwide channels.
