api.video closed a $5.5M Seed Round!
I’m delighted to announce that api.video’s seed round of $5.5M has been raised by Blossom Capital, Kima Ventures and several other extraordinary angels, to allow our API-first service to become the backbone for online video.
This announcement is the occasion for me to reminisce on the api.video journey, our mission and to unveil our next steps!
We launched api.video back in 2019 with the conviction that videos are not only produced by agencies or professionals. Thanks to cameras integrated in our smartphones and the huge range of online solutions to create and edit videos, we are now all able to produce it.
Looking Back: The success of transactional videos
Looking at the success of Stories on Instagram (by the way, have you noticed that there are now more stories than pictures?), video profiles on Facebook, video status on WhatsApp, video-based social networks like TikTok or Yubo or even Zoom, we prefer nowadays to communicate through video than text with our network. Our capacity to produce videos has been quickly solved by hardware suppliers, our methods of sharing video are still quite complicated and siloed by app.
YouTube is the best destination to address video content to a large audience and social networks, the best place to exchange with our friends. But the process of adding or sharing videos within CMS, collaborative platforms, customer support services, e-learning, … remain tedious. Often, the resulting video does not offer the same experience as watching a video on Netflix.
Add a loading feature for a video produced by yourself to explain a default on a product and attach a support ticket to it? Offer to your app users the ability to share a family moment? Offer to buy your training session or sport lessons in video? Allow your students to train orally with their teachers?
Despite all our technological advances, video remains a complex element to share due to its weight, the compression codecs to respect (in order to make videos visible on an iPhone or a TV) but as well due to the connection quality of the audience and the risk of latency.
Our Mission
Rather than offering a new independent video platform or aggregating many services specialized in encoding, with a CDN, an analytics solution, we are convinced that building a simple API allowing to “add a video online and make it accessible immediately anywhere in the world” is the best solution.
Our mission is to allow developers to integrate quickly and with few lines of code the workflow to upload, manage and stream videos in their own platform, service or app. We aim to abstract away all the complexity related to the video process and give a Netflix-quality experience to audiences.
Aware of the wide range of possible usages, only an API-first approach, simple, fast, white-labeled, with native SDKs, can offer the freedom needed for the integrations.
We are beginning 2019 and here is…. api.video!
Looking Ahead: How our funding has helped to shape our future
During the first semester 2019, we released api.video as a free tool to learn about what developers are looking for in a video API. Our goal was to better understand the total developer experience through measurement and observations: how is developer usage, adoption, and technical documentation. 2.000 developers later, the project was getting concrete with amazing feedback from the developer community.
“Hello, thank you for the amazing API. I never implemented an API so easy in my whole career!”
You guys should be very proud of yourselves, you’ve developed a great product
With this knowledge and plans for growth, we decided to start to raise a modest round of funding. It all started with a cold email to Kima Ventures in December, saying “Hello, I am looking for investments to hire a developer evangelist!”.
Big mistake
Kima is much more than funds! They offer the knowledge from various startups to validate your own project and you benefit from their advice, recommendations, priceless information in their intranet ‘Pay It Forward’ and a fast-forward training to identify the amount to raise.
As we continued the discussion, we shared that we also wanted to offer the best documentation and integration standards for the API, build an EDGE worldwide infrastructure dedicated to video and solve the problem of live video latency (you know those 15 secondes when you hear your neighbours sing while the goal is not yet scored on your screen?).
As a result of these discussions and our vision for api.video, the financial plan was progressively redefined and increased.
A month later in January, two distinct possibilities become clear: work immediately with a fund or gather business angels.
At this stage of our growth (when there is still a lot to do), we decided that the Business Angels option was the best for us. Again, the money and the amount was not the priority. The most important was to gather experiences and skills that could understand our work, our mission and that are ready to dive with us in the new adventure.
Starting with Kima, I assure you, is an amazing opportunity, especially having Alexis, “Best Tech VC in Europe” next to you. I can confirm, he is 😊
In few weeks, we met (through Zoom…!) and we managed to gather a dream team of Angels, each of them expert in an api.video field: in infrastructure with Octave Klaba, in video processing with Nicolas Steegman, Frédéric Montagnon, Julien Romanetto and Charlie Songhurst, in analytics with Florian Douetteau, in user experience with Cédric Sellin and in daily support with Eduardo Ronzano, Thibaud Elzière, Michael Benabou and Dominique Romano.
There is a “first rule” which is “not to talk about it” but if you are looking for experienced, available, responsive entrepreneurs who do not hesitate to reassess your choices with the only goal to make you progress, contact Eduardo ;-)
In April of this year, we reached the end of the round. We never say it enough, raising funds is extremely time consuming and the priority is always the business. Throw in the fact that we completed this round in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic added to the challenge. So we decided to stop the raising funds for 2020.
Except that Kima whispers to me that an investment fund, Blossom Capital, wishes to talk to me.
Alexis warned me “I tell you one thing about Ophelia, she is VERY smart”. So we organized a call but without huge interest on my side as we did not want to raise more funds for 2020.
Tip: Tell a VC that you don’t need funds or the will to raise money…it’s usually very efficient 😉
We had our first call with Ophelia on a Thursday night.
Ophelia immediately understood and embraced the huge and challenging project that is api.video. The Blossom team offered the following day to help on recommendations, recruitment, positioning… The following Tuesday, we received the Term Sheet and signed it 3 days later…Go!
We are extremely lucky to be surrounded by so many talented investors. We know we can count on them and their huge experience in the coming years to manage the team growth, to maintain the product quality and to best address the customers’ needs.
I cannot conclude this post without thanking my Team! They managed to grasp the project and follow up on the development: raising funds takes time and can move the founder away from the daily projects. Luckily I could count on them!
And finally, few deserved thanks to Patrick, Marc and Jacob… honored to have had your advice and experience throughout the seed rounds :-)
Now….let’s hire, let’s build, let’s grow!
Cedric, CEO@api.video
https://api.video ; hello@api.video
