{"id":5265,"date":"2017-05-09T14:41:39","date_gmt":"2017-05-09T14:41:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rsoftsolution.com\/blog\/starleaf-takes-40m-to-keep-growing-its-videoconferencing-as-a-service-business.html"},"modified":"2017-05-09T14:41:39","modified_gmt":"2017-05-09T14:41:39","slug":"starleaf-takes-40m-to-keep-growing-its-videoconferencing-as-a-service-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rbsitsoftwaresolution.in\/blog\/starleaf-takes-40m-to-keep-growing-its-videoconferencing-as-a-service-business.html","title":{"rendered":"StarLeaf takes $40M to keep growing its videoconferencing as a service business"},"content":{"rendered":"


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UK teleconference company StarLeaf<\/a>, which sells cloud-based video and conferencing services to businesses, has taken on its first external capital close to a decade\u00a0after first being founded, back in 2008. The $40 million round is co-led by Highland Europe and Grafton Capital.<\/p>\n

StarLeaf, which was founded by three telecoms and video conferencing entrepreneurs who together previously founded and sold three other networking companies (Madge Networks, Calista and Codian), started selling cloud services to customers in 2013 \u2014 and says\u00a0usage of its platform is now doubling year over year.<\/p>\n

Its sales pitch is interoperability with \u201cevery\u201d third-party meeting\/conferencing technology, atop a\u00a0fully owned and operated global video comms network, called the StarLeaf OpenCloud platform. It says this network has full redundancy and duplication across its eight points of presence across North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia;\u00a0industry standard AES-128 encryption covering all video conferences and calls; \u201cexceptional\u201d quality of service and call quality regardless of network, via use of technologies such as resilient codecs and dynamic bandwidth management; a single dashboard-based management portal for granularly controlling deployments; and\u00a0a focus on offering user-friendly, rich\u00a0end-point features such as screen sharing; the ability to transfer videocalls to other users; the ability to add more participants to a one-to-one video call; a centrally managed address book and\u00a0so on.<\/p>\n

With the pitch on the functionality front\u00a0of its platform\u00a0being its offering cloud-based\u00a0capabilities\u00a0that might\u00a0otherwise only be available to businesses\u00a0investing \u201chundreds of thousands of dollars in expensive on-premise video infrastructure\u201d.<\/p>\n

Underpinning its platform\u00a0architecture\u00a0is a clear conviction that video communication is of growing importance to businesses \u2014 for example, it notes that two thirds of its 100 million+ annual call minutes are\u00a0ad hoc point-to-point video calls between users, rather than scheduled meetings. (Though of course the network also supports audio-only comms.)<\/p>\n

StarLeaf says its\u00a0platform is currently being sold into\u00a050 countries worldwide, with what it dubs a \u201crapidly growing\u201d enterprise client base in Europe, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand, \u201cespecially\u201d over the past two years \u2014 noting for example that it\u2019s\u00a0signed up 150 new clients with 1,000+ employees in 2016 vs 65 in 2015. At this point it says it has\u00a0more than 1,000 customers, including the likes of Travelex, Bose, and Dr Martens.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0new funding will be used to support this\u00a0growth momentum \u2014 including by investing in its Asia Pacific business to step up activity there. It says it\u2019s also intending to double its 130-strong headcount in the next 18 months \u2014 having done the same in the past 18 months.<\/p>\n

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Laurence Garrett, partner at Highland Europe, said: \u201cStarLeaf has built its solution from the ground up which gives it a real advantage in ease of use and quality. It offers real interoperability between different vendors which is unique in this market place and is delivering really high quality calls and a brilliant level of service.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Featured Image: Pakhnyushchy<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunchIt\/~3\/H3F-whJA7oM\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UK teleconference company StarLeaf, which sells cloud-based video and conferencing services to businesses, has taken on its first external capital close to a decade\u00a0after first being founded, back in 2008. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[19],"tags":[25],"class_list":["post-5265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-enterprise-software","tag-enterprise"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t