Video streaming startup Uiza raises US$1.5 M seed round through Surge
Uiza.io, Singapore-grown startup that provides streaming technology to make videos accessible, announced that it has closed US$1.5 million seed round through Surge.
Surge is a Sequoia Capital India’s initiative in a form of a scale-up program that seeks to enable access to capital, talent, network, and decades of company-building knowledge. It targets startups in India and Southeast Asia.
Uiza said that it will use the funding to build its products further.
“We plan to use our latest fund raised to attract talented engineers so we can deploy our proprietary technology globally,” said Uiza CEO Kevin Nguyen.
Using its streaming operation system, Uiza addresses the problem of video delivery, especially in developing countries where infrastructure is fragmented. Uiza offers a hardware-agnostic software coupled with a distributed edge delivery network to help their clients broadcast video contents globally at local cost.
Recent Visual Networking Index research by Cisco showed that video streaming and live streaming will account for 80 per cent and 17 per cent of total Internet traffic by 2022. In the next three years, video streaming will have a compound annual growth rate of 33 per cent and 72.7 per cent for live streaming.
Despite the rapid growth of video, the adoption of both video and live streaming is still challenging due to its complex software development and infrastructure, especially relating to bandwidth to process and deliver.
Uiza claimed that its platform leverages machine learning and data science to streamline this workflow and make in-local content delivery routing decisions.
With a simple API, all the complexity in the process is hidden through a hardware-agnostic infrastructure, giving users complete control, availability, and scalability. It translates to the access for developers to add both video and live streaming into their application with a few lines of code.
“At Uiza, we believe that enabling developers, startups, and businesses with video capability is a great way to make positive impacts to the society and to make the world a better place,” said Nguyen.
Its most famous customers is LINE, , which uses Uiza’s platform to stream content that caters to millions of women in Vietnam.
Other customers include e-commerce platforms that allow sellers to demonstrate their products and interact with buyers in real time through livestreaming. It also helps a regional online education company deliver their learning materials to millions of students in Southeast Asia.