Ooyala raises $10 million

Video technology startup scores third round from Rembrandt Venture Partners and Sierra Ventures

Online video technology startup, Ooyala, announced it has raised $10 million in a third round of funding.  Rembrandt Ventures led the round and was joined by return backer Sierra Ventures.  The company has raised a total of $20 million to date.

The Mountain View, Ca.-based startup has built a player which now reaches over 50 million unique users a month, delivering about 100 million streams per month.  Some of the big name customers implementing Ooyala's player include Warner Brothers, National Geographic and Electronic Arts.  The company states it, "reaches more unique users via our customer implementations than Hulu."

And it keeps improving.  Since its founding in 2007, Ooyala has added plenty of new features to its player, making sure to not fall behind on the explosive growth of online video.  Some of the features include  live streaming, real-time analytics, and ad placement capabilities.  

But it's not only about video on your computer screen, what about the merging of television and Internet along with mobile video consumption?  We spoke with Bismarck Lepe, Co-founder of Ooyala who told us he believed that the mobile sector is definitely the fastest growing segment in online video consumption.  The startup said it is currently transcoding and delivering video to a number of devices including the iPhone and Android.  It said it has customers leveraging a technology which allows users to view videos on the iPhone without the need of a plug-in or application.  As for television, Ooyala is powering video streamed to Microsoft's XBox console along with experimenting with other partners.  

With 70 people currently employed at Ooyala now, and a third round of funding, the company isn't planning on raising more.  With this round, its looking to focus on three major elements to carry it to profitability.  First off, continuing global expansion - the company has over 500 customers in 20 different countries.  It said it expects International growth to outpace domestic growth.  Secondly, Ooyala will continue to focus on product innovation and we should expect to see new analytics tools, monetization and content recommendation products for the Web, mobile devices and set top boxes.  Thirdly, its focus on its high profile customers- helping new and existing ones build upon and take advantage of its largest revenue driver, its video platform. 

Ooyala considers its biggest competitor to be Brightcove.

The embedded video below is about Ooyala's analytics tools, and is Ooyala's actual player.