SOURCE: Vidyo

October 04, 2007 09:00 ET

Vidyo Secures $12 Million in Series B Funding

Rho Ventures Leads Funding for Video Conferencing Company

HACKENSACK, NJ--(Marketwire - October 4, 2007) - Vidyo™, Inc., the first company to make deployment of high-definition (HD) video conferencing widely available over the Internet, today announced a $12 million Series B funding led by Rho Ventures, and joined by existing investors Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures. Vidyo will use the new funds to build products and channels to deliver solutions suited to organizations that want affordable, high-definition (HD) video conferencing designed to be transmitted over the Internet.

Until now, to enable high-quality video conferencing, organizations were forced to purchase special-purpose hardware and dedicated bandwidth, making video conferencing both expensive and difficult to use. The VidyoConferencing™ solutions based on the H.264 SVC standard, in contrast, will provide products that surpass the quality of traditional video communications while also dramatically reducing equipment and networking costs. By addressing the performance, cost, ease-of-use, and networking issues associated with traditional video conferencing products, broadly deployed video communications will be made affordable for enterprise and consumer applications.

"The increasingly dispersed locations of people who work together, the difficulty and expense of traveling, and the increasing requirement for people to collaborate are forces that will naturally drive the expanded use of video conferencing," states Joshua Ruch, Managing Partner of Rho Ventures. "It is apparent that H.264 SVC represents a breakthrough for video conferencing, and Vidyo's unique intellectual property complements this standard for multi-point conferencing. We led this round because we think this is the first real opportunity to put the price and performance of video conferencing in line with user expectations, and could ultimately make VidyoCalls as ubiquitous as phone calls!"

"With our first round of funding, we implemented our vision for HD-quality, multi-point video conferencing that runs on standard processors over the open Internet, and that is already validated by industry leading companies," says Ofer Shapiro, CEO of Vidyo, Inc. "We have an aggressive growth plan to deliver products that will dramatically lower the cost and rapidly expand the use of video conferencing. With this funding, we are growing our team, developing our sales channels and developing partnerships to build a major video conferencing company."

The company recently changed its name from Layered Media, Inc. to Vidyo, Inc.

About Vidyo, Inc.

Vidyo™ creates VidyoConferencing™ solutions that deliver quality experiences to all environments from the home-office desktop to the dedicated corporate video-conferencing facility. Vidyo's technology is based upon the H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard, advanced to a higher level of realization by the same team that invented H.264 for video conferencing. The result is HD/Telepresence quality enhanced by industry-best resilience and low-latency -- all accomplished over general-purpose IP networks. Vidyo's family of end-to-end solutions for OEMs and organizations are able to support multi-point connections that include a variety of different platforms ranging from Mac & Windows desktops to dedicated room solutions. No dedicated networks required. Learn more at www.vidyo.com.