Video infrastructure startup Bitmovin, Inc. has raises $10.3 million Series A in a round led by Atomico.

Founded in 2013, Bitmovin offers a platform that improves video quality on the web by enabling “fastest cloud encoding” by using a proprietary encoding service.

The company claims to achieve this by providing implementations of technologies and standards, including MPEG-DASH, which are now used by Netflix or YouTube and account for more than 50 to 70 percent of United States peak traffic.

Bitmovin’s cloud-based video encoding service delivers companies and developers a product that is claimed to be 100 times faster than real-time and other services on the market; their HTML5 using MPEG-DASH and HLS format works on a range of platforms, including desktop, mobile, Smart TVs and VR headsets.

Over-The-Top (OTT) customers are said to include Toolbox, Bouygues Telecom, Nomads, Flimmit, Technicolor, Genflix, and Kronehit while tech partners include Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft, Irdeto, Wowza Media Systems and ad-tech specialist YuMe.

“Bitmovin allows content providers to stream high-quality videos on any platform, with the lowest buffering times and highest quality performance, while making it as easy as possible for developers to build services using our API,” Bitmovin Chief Executive Officer Stefan Lederer said in a statement. “We are not just solving today’s problems. We also offer the best infrastructure for virtual reality streaming and 360 degree video, which means we are helping developers and entrepreneurs offer the latest in video technology to increasingly tech-savvy consumers.” 

New tech

Bitmovin was founded by the people behind MPEG-DASH, a standard that is quickly taking over web streaming in an age where media consumption is switching to the internet.

The DASH in the standard is short for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and enables high quality streaming of media content over the Internet delivered from conventional HTTP web servers and works by works by breaking the content into a sequence of small HTTP-based file segments, each segment containing a short interval of playback time of content that is potentially many hours in duration, such as a movie or the live broadcast of a sports event.

Where the company gets seriously interesting is that its technology can be used in virtual reality, a market that doesn’t require explanation in terms of it currently booming.

It’s not clear how much Bitmovin has raised to date given that it did not disclose the amount of its earlier seed round, however investors in that earlier round included Constantia New Business, CRCM Venture Capital, Greg Castle, Speedinvest and Zillionize Angel.

The company said it would use the new funding to accelerate the development of video playback technologies for existing and new platforms, including 360-degree video for virtual reality.

Image credit: Bitmovin.