Interactive Video Technologies received a commitment of up to $5 million in funding from Monitor Ventures on Thursday, along with continued financial support from Tudor Ventures, enabling it to pursue development of its MediaPlatform and add to its network of partners and resellers.
The investment comes on the heels of other recent funding announcements in the multimedia corporate webcasting field, including a $5.3-million second round of investment announced last week by MediaPublisher. That round was led by Storm Ventures, with participation from the Angels Forum, the Halo Fund, and Garage Technology Ventures.
Another multimedia webcasting developer, Accordent Technologies, received $4 million in a first round of funding led by TVC Ventures in March.
Los Angeles-based Interactive Video Technologies (IVT) specializes in creating, managing, and distributing live and on-demand webcast content. Its customers include IBM, Cisco Systems, Akamai, Halliburton, Ernst & Young, Deloitte, EDS, NEC, AT&T, Rohm and Haas, and others.
IBMAkamaiAT&T“One of the things that was very attractive to us in this field is that large-scale corporate webcasting is coming of age and a lot of companies are starting to deploy it aggressively,” said Teymour Boutros-Ghali, managing partner at Monitor Ventures.
IVT has already spent about $40 million on developing its technology, according to CTO Greg Pulier. He helped start the company about seven years ago during the dot-com era, but the company overspent and began restructuring to achieve profitability.
It is in the process of hunting for a new chief executive. The current leader, Kevin Bethke, is acting as interim CEO.
Profitable Firm
IVT has now begun to turn a profit, but Monitor Ventures wanted to provide a staged commitment of extra capital that IVT could draw upon based on its growth expansion plans.
“We were interested in putting in more capital than they were necessarily looking for at this stage,” said Mr. Boutros-Ghali. “We struck a balance where we made a commitment to provide them with up to $5 million, but that would depend on market conditions and the deployment of IVT’s business.”
He sees positive signs in the other recent funding announcements in the multimedia webcasting field and thought it was the right time to invest. “It’s the beginning of the explosion of a market that people have been waiting to happen for a number of years,” said Mr. Boutros-Ghali.
IVT now has more than 30 companies actively using its product. Mr. Boutros-Ghali was encouraged by the number of customers renewing their licenses and increasing the number of users who could run the software.
He plans to accelerate the growth of IVT through his firm’s association with the Monitor Group, a business consultancy with an extensive clientele in the financial and pharmaceutical industries. He hopes to encourage more of these companies to adopt IVT’s MediaPlatform as their webcasting software.
Technology and Growth
IVT brings a lot of experience to bear, even though it will be competing with MediaPublisher and with Accordent, which targets universities, government agencies, and corporate customers such as Oracle, Ford, and JPMorgan Chase.
Oracle“We’ve been at this since the beginning of the streaming media world,” said Mr. Pulier. “I’ve been on the technology side, building a platform for the use of video in the corporate world. Video is not just like a picture on a page. It has a time factor and needs to be searchable.”
MediaPlatform breaks up content into presentations rather than just blocks of searchable text. Mr. Pulier likens the company’s technology to content management systems from Interwoven and Vignette, but with a strong focus on video.
VignetteMediaPlatform employs templates in which companies can load their content and distribute it corporatewide. The system handles security, monitoring, and logging.
But it’s not so much the technology as the growth opportunities that really matter for Monitor Ventures.
“The money we’re putting in is to provide organic growth or growth through acquisition,” said Mr. Boutros-Ghali. “It’s less at this stage about investing in technology. A tremendous amount of money went into the company historically, but now it’s about growing the company.”
Contact the writer:MCohn@RedHerring.com