Zencoder raises $2 million for video converts

Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, 500 Startups, Y Combinator--Zencoder boasts all the big investors

Zencoder, a video encoding and transcoding SaaS provider, announced Tuesday that it has raised $2 million in funding from a long list of investors: Andreessen-Horowitz, Ignition Partners, SV Angel, Lowercase Capital, Founder’s Collective and 500 Startups.

Also participating are a bunch of individuals Zencoder introduces as having “made a mark in cloud computing,” including Matt Cutts (the head of Google’s Webspam team), James Lindenbaum (co-founder of Heroku, acquired by Salesforce), Orion Henry (Heroku co-founder), Adam Wiggins (Heroku co-founder), Wolfgang Buehler (President of Magor Mold), Mike Bollinger (founder of several startups), and Neil McClements (CEO of Merchenta).

It’s not a particularly large funding round, but it has the backing of a lot of well-known names. And to top it all off, Zencoder has the honor of having been seed funded by Y Combinator and “top Silicon Valley-based angel investors” when it was founded last year.

Zencoder provides businesses large and small with a service for converting videos. It sounds like a small problem, but the reality is that tons of businesses grapple with this problem every day; many already have videos in their websites and applications that they’d like transferred to other platforms, like mobile, but don’t know how to go about doing it. Zencoder handles the maintenance and cost of a transcoding engine, businesses pay Zencoder for the service.

Like a souped up VLC for the enterprise, Zencoder aims to be compatible with literally any file type, from MPEG-1 to Ogg Theora and beyond. The full list of supported video codecs (and audio codecs) is kind of beautiful, if you’re a geek for file types. Zencoder even claims to be able to fix problems with corrupted files.

High quality, fast turnaround, scalability, and ease of use--Zencoder promises all the things someone working with video would be looking for.

“While demand for online video has continued to boom, traditional video encoding methods can’t keep up with scalability challenges, or the ever-changing standards required to publish video on new devices,” said Jon Dahl, Zencoder CEO and co-founder, in a prepared statement. “Zencoder’s cloud-based platform offers customers future-proof encoding that is elastic and highly scalable, providing quick turnaround, outstanding video quality, and universally accessible video.”

The company says it serves hundreds of customers worldwide, including TwitVid, Posterous and College Humor and the PBS television network.