Qik announced yesterday that it has raised a total of $5.5 million in a recent Series C funding. This latest round, coming over a year after Qik raised $3 million in Series B funding in April 2008, was made possible by investments from Quest Venture Partners, CampVentures, and other individuals.
A Foster City-based startup, Qik (pronounced “quick”) is fighting for a place in the vastly growing market for mobile video streaming. The company currently aims their service at two kinds of people: the first kind want to stream video to friends on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and the second kind just want to capture lots of content without filling up the memory on their limited capacity phones. This second point is really a huge bonus, as Qik automatically saves all streamed videos to a user’s profile page.
Already, Qik is available for a wide variety of phones and service providers.
“We as a society continue to ravenously consume engagement media,” commented the latest addition to Qik’s board of directors, Marcus Ogawa of contributor Quest Venture Partners. “I feel strongly that mobile video is on the cusp of exploding into the mainstream.”
And those feelings are not without foundation.
Just two weeks ago, YouTube announced a 1700% increase in mobile uploads over the past six months. Of that increase, 400% rolled in the week up to the announcement, attributed to the release of the new video-shooting Apple iPhone 3G S.
Interestingly, Apple has yet to approve any video streaming apps for the iPhone. For iPhone users, the only option is to shoot a video and then immediately upload it to YouTube. Supposedly bandwidth is the reason for the restriction on mobile streaming, but I’m not sure about that since Qik claims to support three AT&T phones: the AT&T 8525, the AT&T SMT 5700, and the AT&T Tilt. Though its true that none of these phones utilize the 3G network, I still think that the Apple-YouTube alliance has a lot to do with the current limitations.
Nevertheless, even without iPhone support, Qik seems to be on track for success, as it is the leading service in mobile video streaming. With competition from other streaming sites like Justin.tv and Ustream, Qik will likely be using its recently acquired funds to ensure its hold of the mobile upload market.
