Brightcove Raises $12M In Funding, Interview With CEO Jeremy Allaire

Thanks to some good reporting by Jessica Vascellaro at the Wall Street Journal, she's gotten Brightcove to confirm for her article that the company has raised a fourth round of funding totaling $12M. With this latest round of funding, led by Accel Partners and General Catalyst, Brightcove has now raised a total of $99M.

In a call I had with Brigthcove's CEO Jeremy Allaire just after the company confirmed the funding on their blog, I had the chance to ask Jeremy what the money would be used for and why he felt now was the right time to take another round. Jeremy said that, "now is the time to really accelerate and scale the business even faster and this round gives us even more room on our balance sheet." This round is all about acceleration and going faster and investing more aggressively this year."

While Jeremy would not talk in detail about Brightcove's balance sheet, in an interview I did with Jeremy last year, for the first time, he went on record to say that Brightcove was profitable in 2009 and cash-flow positive. Whether or not that's still the case in 2010 we don't know, but with the company growing their revenue by 50% last year and doubling the number of their customers over 2008, Brightcove clearly wasn't in a position where they needed this latest round.

While the WSJ article includes some revenue projections for Brightcove in 2010, Jeremy said Brightcove didn't comment on the "rumors" the WSJ published in regards to projected revenue, as the company does not disclose details about their balance sheet. Jeremy said the company will use some of the new funding to, "expand in more geographies, add more sales and marketing, ramp their Brightcove Express business, add additional products and look at potential M&A."

While some competitors are going to be quick to jump on Brightcove's fourth round of funding and try and portray it as negative, since it now totals a big number ($99M), Brightcove's latest round of funding is good for all the vendors in the online video platform space. In the WSJ article, which I was interviewed for, I estimated that the online video platform (OVP) space was less than $200M in 2009 with the potential to grow to $300M in 2010. There is a lot of growth taking place in this vertical of the industry and content owners are asking more and more about how to ingest, transcode, manage, monetize and track their content as opposed to just delivering it. That's all good news for any OVP vendor and the market still has a lot of growth in it.