Video Startup ViVu Raises $1m in First Round

Silicon Valley startup ViVu Inc. (with a development center in Bangalore) has raised around $1 million in its first round of funding.

The round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Amidzad Partners, with participation from Quest Ventures and other angel investors, including serial entrepreneurs Bill Carrico and Amarjit Gil.

Founded by startup veterans from Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and IIT graduates, ViVu is developing a Participative Event Platform that is designed to enable live video participation from a PC, Macintosh or smart phone without any proprietary downloads and integrate with the popular streaming video and conference solutions.

ViVu’s Participative Event Platform is actually a software service that can be accessed over the web. It’s supposed to scale from corporate training sessions to large video events with thousands of participants.

The product is currently said to be in alpha.

VivU claims its alpha widgetry is already with three customers (we don’t believe such tall claims since the company would not provide us the names of the customers).

The funding will help the company to accelerate product development, which is split between the facilities in Bangalore and Sunnyvale.

Here’s some blah blah blah from ViVu co-founder and CEO Sudha Valluru: 

Our vision is to interactively connect many people over video and make the experience even better than being there. The team developed the first enterprise-quality video over IP a decade ago and is now building a platform that scales and provides the ease-of-use, quality and availability expected in an enterprise.

ViVu’s Chief Architect and co-founder Siva Kiran is an alumnus of IIT Guwahati. A few other members of the ViVu team are also supposed to be IIT alumni.

ViVu also announced the establishment of the Technical Advisory Board of Bill Carrico, Phil Graham and John Varney. Bill Carrico was chairman/CEO of Bridge (acquired by 3Com), NCD and Precept (acquired by Cisco). Phil Graham is the vice president of Engineering and CTO of Cisco Telepresence, and John Varney was the CTO of the British Broadcasting Corporation.

ViVu is targeting its product at enterprises for use in a variety of ways: remote training courses, sales training on new products, and remote live video caller participation during Webcasts.

Pricing is said to depend on the component selected from the ViVu suite.

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