Qwilt, a startup that specializes in “transparent” caching systems, said it has landed a $25 million “D” round, expanding its total funding to about $65 million.
Tel Aviv/New York-based VC Disrupt-ive led the round with a $16 million investment, with help from Cisco Investments and Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Existing investors Accel Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker LLC and Redpoint Ventures also contributed to the round.
Qwilt said it will use the fresh funds from this “strategic” round of funding to build scale, speed up its go-to-market strategy, enhance its flagship product, Qwilt Video Fabric, and to expand support to tier 1 operators worldwide.
Rather than serving as a specialized edge cache, such as the one Netflix uses for its Open Connect private CDN program, Qwilt’s is “transparent” (though the company styles its system as “open”) in the sense that it monitors and caches online video from multiple sources to help partners save on network transport costs.
That sort of set up will continue to come in handy as video continues to represent more and more of the composition of the Internet’s traffic. Cisco Systems forecasted in its recent Video Networking Index that video will represent 80% of all IP traffic globally by 2019.
Among MSOs, Mediacom Communications has rolled out Qwilt’s transparent video caching platform to boost the quality of online video delivered via its broadband network. Qwilt, which said sales grew 400% year-over-year in 2014, also works with mobile carriers, telcos and university networks.
Qwilt is also a member of the recently launched Streaming Video Alliance, a group that is focused on open caching standards and streaming video infrastructure and counts Comcast, Charter, Liberty Global, EPIX among its founding members.
