Blue Jeans Network, the global leader in cloud-based video collaboration services, today announced it has secured $76.5 million in new funding led by NEA with participation from previous investors Accel, Battery Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners, and new investors Glynn Capital, Quadrille Capital and Derek Jeter, among others.
The new funding arrives as Blue Jeans achieves record growth across every critical business metric for the fourth straight year, including bookings (ARR), revenues, subscribers, meetings, minutes, participants and more. Blue Jeans has at least doubled, tripled, or quadrupled each of these metrics year-over-year, every year, since it launched its service in 2011. Today, the Blue Jeans Network provides more than 1 billion minutes of real-time video collaboration annually to over 25 million participants around the world.
The new funding will help accelerate this growth with global market expansion in Europe, Asia and Australia, and support ongoing product innovation that sets the standard for visual collaboration and delivers an unparalleled customer experience.
'Despite all the advances in modern technology, the human face is still the most powerful tool for business,' said Krish Ramakrishnan, CEO, Blue Jeans Network. 'As organizations have become more geographically dispersed, the need for video has become more critical than ever to establish and maintain meaningful connections, foster empathy and understanding, and improve communications. Our customers improve their productivity, save time and money, and build better relationships with Blue Jeans. We are so proud of how far we've come in a few short years, but we are not done yet. With this investment we are fueling up our tanks and preparing to step on the gas.'
'Blue Jeans has rapidly become the leader in cloud-based video communication, and we are thrilled to lead their pre-IPO financing round,' said Jon Sakoda, general partner at NEA. 'This team made the right bet five years ago, predicting that the emergence of cloud, video, and mobile technologies would rapidly expand the market for collaboration. They've executed tremendously well, delivering growth that ranks them among the fastest growing SaaS companies in history while continuing to disrupt the market incumbents with innovative new products and services.'
Blue Jeans set the industry standard for video as a service when it first launched in 2011 and disrupted the market with its hallmark interoperability, providing the first, best, and only solution that could seamlessly connect business video conference room systems like Cisco and Polycom with consumer desktop and mobile solutions like Skype and Google. With these unique capabilities, great performance, and an easy to use interface, Blue Jeans disrupted the billion-dollar-a-year video bridging hardware (MCU) market as customers abandoned legacy hardware solutions for Blue Jeans' cloud-based offering.
The company has also seen tremendous adoption of its service as a 'converged conferencing' solution that offers customers a single tool for their combined audio, video, and web conferencing needs. Customers no longer have to decide in advance if a meeting will be an audio, video, or web call and then use a different tool from a different vendor, with a different account and user interface. Blue Jeans provides them one tool that works whether people join over audio or video and whether or not they have presentations or other content to share.
More recently, Blue Jeans has gained traction for its underlying platform and APIs which allow customers and partners to embed interactive video capabilities into their own applications and workflows. These capabilities are being used today by healthcare, training, and call center customers and have also been embedded in popular applications like Salesforce Chatter.
In addition to Blue Jeans' flagship meetings service, earlier this year the company released its second major product line, a large-scale interactive events and experience service called Blue Jeans Primetime. Blue Jeans Primetime extends Blue Jeans' interactive video conferencing with new streaming capabilities to broadcast events to a worldwide audience, and includes the unique ability for the moderator to switch participant roles between active participant and passive observer, making it possible for speakers and their audiences to interact in brand new ways.
In the few months since its launch, Blue Jeans Primetime has seen success not only providing existing customers with a new tool for their all-hands meetings, large training sessions, and marketing events, but also opening up new market opportunities in media, entertainment, and sports for early adopters like TED, The Sundance Film Festival, and The Players' Tribune.
With this unique portfolio of services for meetings, events, and experiences, Blue Jeans continues to provide tremendous value to its rapidly growing global customer base. Today almost 5,000 organizations ranging from high-growth startups, to the Fortune 100, to industry leaders in healthcare, education, technology, media and entertainment use Blue Jeans every day to collaborate, boost business and engage with their most important audiences. Customers such as Facebook, Sephora, Red Hat, The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Code.org are just a few that have saved approximately 7.5 billion travel miles, $3.3 billion in travel costs and 2.7 billion pounds of CO2 thanks to Blue Jeans.
'When I met the Blue Jeans team, I was busy starting my new venture, The Players' Tribune, a media site dedicated to helping athletes tell their own stories directly,' said Derek Jeter. 'I was captivated by what Blue Jeans' video could do to amplify the voice of our athletes. Now after working closely with the team, I share their vision and see the enormous potential that exists for interactive video events and experiences in business, sports, media and entertainment.'
This funding round brings the total overall financing for Blue Jeans to $175 million.
About Blue Jeans Network
At Blue Jeans Network, we aim to bring great minds together to meet, share ideas and reach their audiences through the power of video collaboration. By making video communication easy, secure and scalable, our customers can make online conversations, meetings and events personal again. Blue Jeans' cloud-based platform has taken video into the mainstream, giving thought leaders in business, education, entertainment, and media the power to interact face-to-face with anyone, anywhere. Blue Jeans Network is a private company headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information go to: http://bluejeans.com or follow the company on twitter @BlueJeansNet.