Skyfire Raise $10M in Funding for Expansion to Europe and Asia
Video optimization and mobile cloud solutions company Skyfire announced today that it's taken in $10 million in Series D funding. The investment will be used to drive the company's expansion to Europe and Asia.
The Series D round was led by Panorama Capital, a new investor to Skyfire. Existing investors Verizon Ventures, Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners also took part in the round.
Besides expanding into Europe and Asia, Skyfire will use the money to build up its team to work with current customers and create new relationships, especially in Eastern Europe, Japan, Southeast Asia, and Australia. It will both build up staff for its current wireless operator customers and build up its sales and marketing teams for new markets.
Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck predicts what he calls "mobile warming": the overstraining of mobile networks due to vastly greater mobile data consumption. Skyfire aims to prevent that with its Skyfire Rocket Optimizer platform, which optimizes data over mobile networks. Skyfire claims customers see an average of 60 percent data savings on video and 50 percent on images.
"Data deluge is crushing mobile operators, straining the user experience, and squeezing operating margins," says Glueck. "Operators in Europe have announced that bandwidth on 4G LTE networks is being filled 85 percent by video alone. Our new funding lets Skyfire take our proven technology in North America to new regions on a global scale."
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