Deal Radar 2008: Veodia

Video production was traditionally cumbersome. Veodia plans to change that, by offering its clients the ability to stream high quality video via an SaaS platform. Its service allows companies to broadcast live, on-demand videos without making significant investments in manpower and technology.

Veodia enables organizations’ existing departments to meet their business video needs (training, executive communications, team collaboration, sales) without the inconvenience of hiring a special department or production company to handle such requirements. Such solutions of course help companies cut costs and produce the required video content more quickly and efficiently. The SaaS model makes it easy for business departments like marketing or training to use the service without having to involve the IT department.

The product was launched in April 2007 and focuses on the needs of enterprises, as it provides complete content ownership, security, and varying playback options (PC, Mac, iPod, iPhone) in an all-in-one video platform-as-a-service. No special hardware is required to use Veodia – all users need is a computer, a camera, and an Internet connection to achieve superior quality video results (MPEG-4/h.264). Veodia is available to companies on a subscription basis.

The company was founded in 2006 by Guillaume Cohen, who was previously head of enterprise business at Envivio, a spin-off of France Telecom. It is based in San Mateo, California. The company raised $1.2 million in its angel round (convertible note), and in May 2008 it announced it had raised $8.3 million in a Series A round from leading investors Clearstone Venture Partners and the D.E. Shaw group. Interestingly, D.E. Shaw is a hedge fund, and their investment in Veodia is representative of a broader trend of hedge funds playing in the venture capital business.

Veodia now has more than 100 customers made up of both Fortune 2,000 companies and small and medium businesses. Veodia’s platform has been used by national conferences like the MIT Emerging Technologies conference, the Office 2.0 conference, and GigaOm’s NewTeeVee Pier Screenings. Others like frog design, UCSF, BEA Systems, and IBM are also Veodia customers.

In June this year, Veodia partnered with Jive Software to bring its video capabilities to Jive’s proprietary product Clearspace, thereby allowing users to interact more effectively. In December 2007, Adobe announced Flash would support h.264.

Veodia shares the market with many other platforms like YouTube, Mogulus and blip.tv. But Veodia stands apart from the crowd because it was built entirely for the enterprise market. Cohen told the E-Commerce Times that this market “expects very high visual quality; wants quality of service and will pay for service-level agreements; and wants confidentiality and access control to content, and wants to make sure it retains ownership.”

Flexible, scalable, user-friendly video solutions will change for the better the way businesses collaborate with their employees and customers, and Veodia is a company to watch in that space.

This segment is a part in the series : Deal Radar 2008