Video collaboration service Blue Jeans raises $76.5M

The company will use the funding to expand across Europe, Asia and Australia

I'm a big fan of the idea of working remotely. The traditional office, rightly I believe, is going away, and that cannot happen soon enough. Team members still need to collaborate, though, and that means video conferencing. It can be difficult to get everyone on the same platform, though, depending on what device they are using or where they are.

Video conferencing platform Blue Jeans was founded on the idea of solving that problem. It is as an interoperable cloud-based system that enables people to join over virtually any device.

The company has grown quite a bit over the last few years and it has now announced it has secured $76.5 million in new funding.

The round was led by NEA, with participation from previous investors Accel Partners, Battery Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners, and new investors Glynn Capital, Quadrille Capital, and Derek Jeter, among others.

This funding round brings the total overall financing for Blue Jeans to $175 million.

Founded in 2009, the service allows people to check into conference calls from virtually any device and system.  Users can connect via room systems like Cisco TelePresence and Vidyo, desktop systems, video software like Cisco, Skype, Microsoft Lync, or Google Video Chat, mobile video software like Skype, and more.

It also offers Blue Jeans Primetime, which is an interactive, large-scale video events platform.

"Blue Jeans offers unparalleled interoperability. This means that our customers can seamlessly realize the benefits of video conferencing how and where they choose.  We’re endpoint agnostic so you can leverage the hardware you already own to enjoy a high-quality, video collaboration experience whether that is from a room system, browser or mobile device," Krish Ramakrishnan, Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Jeans Network, told me in an interview.

"Additionally, Blue Jeans Primetime is the only solution on the market that enables large-scale, online events to become a two-way interactive experience--turning passive viewers into active participants."

Blue Jeans has nearly 5,000 customers around the world, on verticals ranging from the Fortune 500, to Education, Healthcare, Client Services, Entertainment, etc. and including names like Facebook, Stanford, Sephora, TED, Sundance Film Festival and Derek Jeter’s new media venture, The Players’ Tribune.  

In all, its customers use the service for approximately 1 billion minutes a year. Since it launched in 2011,  Blue Jeans has at least doubled, tripled, or quadrupled its bookings (ARR), revenues, subscribers, meetings, minutes and participants.

"Blue Jeans’s value is in the easy face-to-face connection. No matter where you are, or what device you are using, people can seamlessly connect," said Ramakrishnan.

"The real business value can be seen with a tool available through Blue Jeans’ Command Center, the ROI calculator which shows how many dollars have been saved on travel as well as carbon emissions. According to a recent report, in 2015 alone over 7.5 billion travel miles have been avoided, $3.3 billion travel costs saved and 2.2 billion pounds of CO2 reduced thanks to Blue Jeans meetings."

The new funding will be used for global market expansion in Europe, Asia and Australia.

"When we started Blue Jeans we focused on getting it right in the US market. Over the years we have expanded to these regions as it made sense for customer demand and have set up a local presence in each of these markets and will continue to grow our team there in order to keep up with our global growth," Ramakrishnan told me.

It will also go toward supporting product innovation, with the goal of being "a single platform to meet all of your video, audio and web conferencing needs for both meetings and interactive, online events."

 "We built this company with the mission to make video accessible, scalable and affordable. We see a convergence of real-time collaboration and video happening in the market. We want to define that space, making video calls as simple and easy as picking up the phone," said Ramakrishnan. "We think video is going to become the primary mode of business communication for conversations, meetings, events and experiences."