Investing in 100ms

It’s hard to spend time online and not be constantly reminded by the sheer power of the web. It knits our world together, keeping us informed and connected at all times. We tweet and retweet, vlog, comment, stream, watch, etc. We live our lives on the internet. While this has been the case for some time now, it’s certainly accelerated over the last two years on the back of COVID. Zoom replaced meeting rooms, video games replaced playgrounds, Peloton replaced gyms. In other words, synchronous experiences became key to making sure that we stayed connected, that we stayed sane, that the world could keep moving.

Research says it takes an average of 66 days to form a habit. It’s fair to say that two years since the onset of COVID and the mass transition to ‘online everything’, new habits have been formed. ‘Live’, particularly live video, is now part of our every day routine. We’re shopping on platforms like Popshop and Whatnot, studying in virtual libraries such as StudyStream, exploring the world from the comfort of our homes via Heygo, pitching to and raising capital from hundreds of investors in real-time on Stonks, attending conferences in Hopin and collaborating with colleagues on Zoom, Google Hangouts, etc.

COVID undeniably shifted live video adoption into sixth gear — and for good reason. We had no other choice if we wanted to keep the lights on. The end-result: live video is now eating the world… but we’ve yet to get to the entrée. At LocalGlobe, we’ve long held the belief that ‘live’ would engulf the web. Our view: People love ‘live’ because live is more engaging and ‘in the moment’. It lets you connect online in ways you simply couldn’t before. It makes the vast lands of the internet feel smaller, the world more connected.

But building live products is inherently difficult. Video infrastructure requires sophisticated engineering knowledge that few truly have, let alone have mastered. There are endless edge cases that need to considered and accounted for when building (e.g. changes in network conditions, device conditions, etc). It comes as no surprise that Zoom has thousands of engineers working on its products — live video is hard. It’s also mission critical and unforgiving — there is no room for error. Poor latency and participants drop off. Choppy audio and participants drop off. Low quality video… you get the point. Zoom has created a certain level of expectation around video stability — one that’s nearly impossible for the average company to replicate… Until today.

Enter 100ms, a company looking to democratise ‘live’ infrastructure for all. In much the same way that Stripe democratised the ability for anyone to build payments into their product via a single API, 100ms is democratising live video and audio. In simple terms, the company abstracts all of the complexity that one has to deal with when building live infrastructure into a simple SDK. 100ms enables developers to add ‘live’ features into their product with less than half-dozen lines of code. In other words, they empower developers to focus on what truly matters: building great products that serve user needs, not on building infrastructure. The company’s SDK enables total flexibility — developers can use it to build video applications like Hopin or audio products like Clubhouse in a matter of hours, not months. Sky’s the limit, the only constraint is one’s imagination.

By eliminating the need to build infrastructure in-house, we believe that 100ms can and will unlock huge innovation on the application layer, unbundling Zoom, Hangouts and everyone else along the way. In a similar fashion to how messaging became ubiquitous — embedded everywhere — so will live video. Synchronous experiences will be present by default — in social and commerce applications, within collaboration software, health, online education, games, etc. We’re beginning to see this play out but it’s still very much day zero.

At LocalGlobe, we’ve been building/investing in video & video infrastructure for a while:

— Saul co-founded LoveFilm back in 2002, which was sold to Amazon. He also spent time on the exec team at Skype in the very early days.

— We partnered with Rahul and Karan at Cosmos Video to enable remote teams to connect with one another seamlessly over the internet.

— We backed Robin and Pierre at Claap to help companies drastically reduce the number of meetings they’re having using async video communication.

— We partnered with Jesse and Jiameng at Papercup to make the world’s videos watchable in any language.

— We backed Antonio at Muse AI to reinvent video hosting on the web.

— We’ve also backed a number of companies such as AccuRx, Circle and uLesson who leverage video to deliver their service to millions of people around the world.

In short, we’ve been in and around video for some time now and have seen how powerful of a medium it can be in bringing us closer over the internet. We’ve also seen how difficult it is to build live infrastructure. When we met Kshitij, Aniket and Sarvesh, we immediately knew that they were the team to solve this problem. The three have been working in video infrastructure for years, most recently together at Disney+ Hotstar, India’s largest premium streaming service. The tech that they built there, enabled Disney+ Hotstar to break the record for the highest number of concurrent viewers on a single livestream → 25.3 million to be precise. They’re now bringing that same tech to every developer around the world, neatly packaged in a few lines of code.

Today, we’re incredibly excited to announce that we’re partnering with the three of them as they set sail on their journey of democratising live video. We’re thrilled to be investing in their Series A round alongside Falcon Edge, Accel, Matrix Partners and STRIVE.

As Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail put it, 100ms is the threshold “where interactions feel instantaneous”. The company’s name is a testament to their ambition of making this a reality for all experiences on the web. We cannot wait to see what will be built using their technology.