We’re Building a Category Leader

Why We Raised an $18 Million Series B

by IRIS.TV Co-Founders Field Garthwaite & Richie Hyden

Today we're excited to announce that IRIS.TV has raised $18M of Series B equity funding. This capital will enable us to achieve our mission to connect and unify video data from any source to deliver better business outcomes and more enjoyable viewing experiences.

IRIS.TV is building an essential ingredient for the future of video: access to normalized video data. We couldn't have a better partner than Intel Capital helping IRIS.TV build a category-leading company. Alongside Intel Capital, we received growth investment from Quest Venture Partners, Wise Ventures, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and some amazing entrepreneurs. We're pleased to call them partners and you can learn more in our press release.

It may be no surprise that IRIS.TV is growing fast. Over the last year, our installed base has grown from hundreds of publishers to over 7,000, reaching a scale that is equivalent to greater than 20% the size of YouTube in views and ad requests. IRIS.TV provides content owners, publishers, broadcasters, and connected TV apps with access to video-level data to increase yield, and more effectively invest in new content (as Netflix has proven is highly valuable at scale). Marketers and advertisers who utilize video-level data increase ROI on every dollar invested in video by ensuring their brand messages are shown alongside premium, brand-suitable video content. This is a very large high growth market as over $40 billion of digital video advertising will expand to $200 billion annually as linear TV advertising migrates to digital and addressable platforms.

Video is where people spend most of their time on the internet—more time than e-commerce, search, and social media combined. The problem is that videos are complex assets that live in proprietary and siloed databases, locked behind companies' content management systems and video players that make the data on those videos inaccessible. IRIS.TV is changing this paradigm by making video data across the entire video and connected TV ecosystems accessible to developers, product teams, revenue teams, and marketers. We standardize video data from any source into a canonical data set, enriched by >10 of the most sophisticated computer vision companies in the world, and that data is made available using the iris_id as a common identifier. 

We started from humble beginnings working with video publishers to build large loyal audiences. Since raising our Series A we've generated hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue for those customers. During that time, our team built thousands of API integrations across the video streaming, adtech, and martech ecosystems. We did this work to build the best video recommender API on the web, a service trusted by many of the largest video streaming platforms in the world. Fast forward to today, we’ve expanded our API integrations to provide universal access to video-level contextual data on our platform.

Within the coming weeks and months, we have some exciting announcements that will make it clear how we will use the new capital. New team members, new APIs, new integrations, new partnerships, and some surprises. Please keep an eye on our blog, Twitter, and LinkedIn to stay up to date.

We feel lucky to be part of this great company with such a strong team of employees, content owners, and partners who use our platform. We have an opportunity to build the data infrastructure for the future of video and television. We promise to deliver on that goal. 

Thank you for supporting IRIS.TV!