Livepeer raises $20 million to grow the network for a Web3 future
Livepeer has raised a $20 million funding round that will help future-proof the network and prepare it for the next phase of growth.
Livepeer will use the funds for key hires as well as to strengthen and extend the network’s reach across multiple blockchain ecosystems. The team will also add functionalities such as scene classification, object recognition, song-title detection, video fingerprinting, and video stack expansion. These new capabilities will advance the project further toward its goal of making Livepeer a full-service architecture for video app developers.
Old and new Livepeer supporters joined the investment round. Led by Digital Currency Group (DCG), the group also included Northzone, Coinbase Ventures, Coinfund, Mike Dudas’s Six Man Ventures, and Warburg Serres.
Northzone, DCG and Coinfund also invested in the June 2019 fundraising, which raised $8 million.
The endorsement of investors who so deeply understand the transformative potential of decentralization was a welcome vote of confidence in the future of the Livepeer ecosystem.
Matt Beck, DCG’s Director of Investments, said Livepeer is in an ideal position to be the market leader in open web infrastructure.
“We’re thrilled to lead Livepeer’s Series B to support its critical role in the Web3 technology stack,” Beck said. “As Livepeer network usage continues to surge, (co-founder and CEO) Doug (Petkanics) and the team are charting the path to building a market-leading, and truly global, decentralized video streaming network.”
Recently, Livepeer has gone from strength to strength. This year alone, the best measure of developer adoption — the quantity of raw video processed in a week — has grown sixfold, from less than 400,000 minutes on January 3 to a record high of 2.4 million minutes in the week ending July 4.
Streaming market poised to expand further
And with trends such as live ecommerce gaining popularity across the globe, increasing adoption of VR and AR applications, and an anticipated reluctance among consumers to return to cinemas in large numbers following pandemic lockdowns, video streaming seems on course for even more growth in future.
In its annual report on global media and entertainment, PricewaterhouseCoopers forecast a video streaming market worth some $94 billion by 2025.
“The creator economy is fast becoming a staple of the digital media landscape,” said Doug. “Rather than watch TV or consume content through traditional channels, fans are connecting directly with their favorite creators. These 1:1 relationships require new tools and technologies like Livepeer, which is perfectly positioned as the critical infrastructure for emerging creator economy platforms.”
Without Livepeer, many start-ups hoping to challenge Google’s YouTube and Amazon’s Twitch for market share would be forced to either run their own infrastructure or pay hefty fees to cloud-based services run by the owners of their larger rivals.
Because it is decentralized and powered by many distributed node operators, the Livepeer network can provide transcoding for a fraction of these costs, said CoinFund founder and CEO Jake Brukhman.
“In creating an open market run by a decentralized network of active participants, Livepeer’s transcoding can be 10 times cheaper (or more) than centralized alternatives such as Amazon Web Services,” he said.
“We’re looking forward to working with the team as they continue to grow as the leading decentralized video streaming network built on blockchain technology.”
The Livepeer network of 70,000 GPUs already has enough collective power to encode all the real-time video streaming through Twitch, Facebook, and Youtube combined.
“Livepeer has had a laser focus on building Web3 technology that impacts real users since Day One,” said Northzone partner Wendy Xiao Schadeck. “With this latest fundraise, Livepeer will solidify its position as an invaluable part of the future web infrastructure.”
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