Video is here to stay. Our investment in Daily
We are thrilled to announce our investment in Daily, the developer platform that provides companies with the fastest way to integrate video and audio to any site or app. We are leading Daily’s $40 million Series B with participation from Tiger Global, Lachy Groom, Freestyle, and Root Ventures. Roseanne Wincek will be joining the Board of Directors along with Lee Edwards from Root Ventures, who has been working with the company for years.
The pandemic has forever changed how we live, work, and interact on the internet. Video chat drives rich human-to-human experiences online, including remote work, telehealth, fitness classes, events, ecommerce, virtual collaboration and customer support.
We all know how far developers can stretch the limits of imagination and of what is possible when given a new set of tools. Daily’s WebRTC APIs power a universe of emerging use cases for the next wave of innovation. With just two lines of code, a developer can add Daily’s secure, fully-featured video chat widget to any app or site, and use the company’s front-end libraries to build customized video layouts.
Since February 2020, over 80% of US adults have used video calls. However, while the vast majority of online interaction happens in rich apps and the browser, video communication remains largely in standalone, single-use apps like Zoom, FaceTime, or Skype. This is because before Daily there weren’t ways to integrate video into other apps without high latency or questionable data privacy.
At Renegade, we talk about investing in movements. Companies that have the ability to become verbs. There are three hallmarks that all movements possess and why we believe Daily is building a movement:
Attacking a market at a tipping point. Video is here to stay, and Zoom and FaceTime have trained consumers and workers to expect highly-reliable low latency video. Daily allows developers to take the power of interactive video and embed it into a broad range of applications. Imagine being able to purchase directly from a 1,000 person social shopping session, or hold a meeting in the app that you’re working in rather than screen-sharing.
Building a compounding advantage. Daily is an incredible developer-first company (seriously, check out how beautiful their documentation is). Video is a massive revolution online, and Daily has the opportunity to be the developer standard powering an infinite number of use cases. Daily will be to video what Stripe is to payments and Twilio is to SMS.
Purpose-driven. Enterprise video is CEO Kwin Hultman Kramer’s life’s work. Kwin’s previous company, Oblong Industries, started bringing video into the workplace in 2005. The team includes authors of dozens of IEEE and W3C WebRTC specifications. This team has been driving the ball forward on video for literal decades at this point and is now giving that experience to developers through a set of elegant APIs.
We are thrilled to partner with Kwin, Nina, and the entire Daily team. We’re even more excited about all of the products and services developers have yet to dream up that will be powered by the platform.