The venture capital market is clearly still bullish on the broad video market as the dollars keep flowing into both start-up and well established companies. It is interesting to watch where the dollars are going - there has been a lot of investment in video analytics companies, IP camera manufacturers, video management software providers (primarily IP camera based) and other leading edge providers that are changing the landscape of the video surveillance world.
I saw two recent examples today.
The first was VideoIQ, which raised $10M in a Series B (second round of funding for those that don’t speak VC) round from Atlas Ventures, Matrix Partners, and Lehman Brothers Venture Capital - all very successful and well-known VCs. VideoIQ is a technology company that spun out of GE Security last year that does IP cameras with on-board storage and analytics. From their website, “VideoIQ is taking a leadership role in making video analytics a standard part of every video surveillance system with affordable, plug-and-play analytics systems that perform in every environment.” They say, not surprisingly, that the new money is to fuel market expansion and product development (has a start-up ever said anything else when it comes to how they plan to use their money?)
The second was Milestone Systems, which raised a whopping $27M, from Index Ventures, a European VC firm that I don’t know much about. It is interesting to see Milestone, who makes software to manage IP camera networks, raise money as they have been in business for 10 years and have a rather large business with offices in 9 different countries. Despite not being a startup, guess what Milestone is going to do with its new capital? From their press release “Milestone will also use the funding to continue development of its technology platform and spearhead new business initiatives”
It is great to see such strong investment activity continuing in our space - it is a great sign that the market continues to have tremendous promise for those that can innovate and create value for their customers.
