Bitmovin, the world leader in online video infrastructure software, has raised $30 million in Series B funding, led by Highland Europe, to help expand its global customer base of TV streaming providers, internet companies and social media companies. The funding will allow Bitmovin to scale its product R&D, field engineering and sales teams worldwide.

Bitmovin solves complex video problems arising from the exponential growth in online video consumption through its video compression, playback and analytics APIs, making it possible to stream video in higher quality with less bandwidth, while preventing buffering and long start-up delays. Bitmovin's customers include Sling, Periscope, The New York Times, ProSiebenSat.1, Red Bull Media House, FuboTV, RTL and iflix - collectively delivering billions of videos to consumers every day.

The Series B investment round was led by Highland Europe, with participation from existing investors Atomico, Constantia New Business, Dawn Capital and YCombinator. This latest round brings the total investment in Bitmovin to $43 million. The company also has experienced Silicon Valley veterans as angel investors, including the former Cisco CTO Ed Kozel, as well as the former VP of Engineering of Netflix, the founder of Gaikai, the founder of Drupal, and the founder of Unity3D. Bitmovin is also an alumnus of YCombinator, the leading global start-up accelerator.

Bitmovin evolved out of the founders' PhD research project and, in less than five years, has become a leader in next generation online video technology. The company has been at the forefront of all major developments in online video - from building the world's first commercial adaptive streaming player to deploying the first containerised encoding service that runs on any cloud provider or in a data centre. Bitmovin's founders co-created the MPEG-DASH video streaming standard that is used by Netflix and YouTube and delivers over 50 per cent of total internet traffic.

Bitmovin's technology stack provides critical API building blocks for content publishers as video consumption moves away from cable and satellite TV towards online video consumed on any device, at any time. Cisco predict that 80% of total internet traffic will be comprised of video by 2021. Recent innovations include being the first to support the AV1 video compression standard (the new royalty-free codec backed by Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Samsung) and adding artificial intelligence to video encoding. This has resulted in industry-wide recognition for Bitmovin, including being selected as Best of NAB by Streaming Media magazine and regularly appearing in Streaming Media's "Top 100 companies that matter most in online video.

"As the shift to streaming approaches a tipping-point and becomes the dominant format of consuming sports, news, movies and drama, Bitmovin is addressing an unprecedented market opportunity," says Fergal Mullen, Partner at Highland Europe. "With video now critical to all social media platforms, as well as many more internet companies and increasingly corporates and educators, Stefan and his team are set to shape the future of video technology."

"Our mission is to provide the infrastructure layer for all video on the internet, a market that combines traditional media customers as well as Internet companies transforming into video companies," said Stefan Lederer, CEO and co-founder at Bitmovin. "In our view, every internet company is going to be a video company in the future, which is a huge opportunity for Bitmovin to be an integral part of the internet infrastructure."

"Bitmovin allows us to iterate on our video technology faster than any other provider in the market. Its API is the most robust and developer friendly, and it offers a support model that allows our developers to work extremely closely together. It simply provides the best-in-class video technology that allows us to continue to deliver the highest-quality streaming service for our subscribers," said Sung Ho Choi, Co-Founder, fuboTV.

About Bitmovin

Bitmovin is a leading provider of video infrastructure for online media companies around the world. The company has been at the forefront of all major developments in online video - from building the world's first commercial adaptive streaming player to deploying first software-defined encoding service that runs on any cloud provider or in a data centre. Bitmovin works with media companies across the globe to build innovative video products. To find out more, please visit www.bitmovin.com.

About Highland Europe

Highland Europe invest in growth-stage European internet, mobile and software companies that address large market opportunities. Launched in 2012 and with over €580m ($640m) in capital raised across two funds, the firm's origins were as the European operations of Highland Capital Partners, a U.S. venture capital firm. Highland Europe is based in London and Geneva and its current portfolio includes GetYourGuide, Featurespace, ContentSquare, Malwarebytes, Wetransfer, Nexthink, AMCS and Matchesfashion, among many others.