Startup Run By Former Comcast Execs Raises $2M

Wicket Labs,  a Seattle-based startup that includes two former Comcast online video execs among its founders, has raised $2 million in funding, according to this SEC Form D filed Monday (June 5).

Last fall, Wicket Labs talked up a plan to help partners keep tabs on “mission critical” APIs and to therefore eliminate a “blind spot” associated with online video, but has been keeping quiet on its product strategy ever since.

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Wicket Labs’s site doesn’t delve deeply into the company’s product, but hints that the “effective use of data will be a decisive factor in determining the winners in the future of television” as the TV audience continues to become more fragmented amid time spent on social networks, personal devices and with OTT services.

“As veterans of cloud computing and the online video market, the team behind Wicket Labs is setting out on a new mission to level the playing field for media companies in an arena where data and insights drive winning strategies,” the site explains.

Wicket Labs is led by CEO Marty Roberts, the former co-CEO of thePlatform, the online video publish company that Comcast acquired in 2006 (now part of a unit called Comcast Technology Solutions), and an exec who is also late of RealNetworks.

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He’s joined by two other Wicket Labs co-founders: chief strategy officer Ian Blaine, a co-founder and former CEO of thePlatform who also served as SVP at Comcast’s Converged Products group, and VP of product Eric Knutson, who previously was senior director of operations at Rhapsody (which took on the Napster brand in 2016),  and a principal at North Highland Worldwide Consulting.