With its first product already out and selling into the hot video
processing sector, Elemental Technologies Inc. raised its first
round
of institutional venture capital. The company General Catalyst Partners and
Voyager Capital for $7.1 million to support expanded marketing of its
Badaboom Media Converter and to boost additional product development.
Elemental co-founder and CEO Sam Blackwell (pictured) announced the deal to company
followers by way of an apology for not posting more often on the
company
blog,
explaining that he has been spending extra time working on putting
the round together. And he outlined how completing the deal has
allowed the company to call on additional resources beyond cash in
beefing up its board.
With the new investment, the company adds Neil Sequeira, from General Catalyst Partners and Erik Benson from
Voyager to its board, and also brings in former Intel Corp. and
Intel Capital executive Frank Gill and Adobe Systems Inc. [
ADBE] CEO Bruce Chizen
as an observer.
ETI makes software for massively parallel processing, initially
targeting video applications, but potentially applicable in other
graphics applications. The company's proprietary software runs on
off-the-shelf NVIDIA graphics processing units and is capable of video
encoding, transcoding and filtering as much as 10 times faster than
existing processes, potentially easing the distribution of
video on the Internet.
Despite refraining from raising traditional VC up until now, Elemental in October 2006 announced investment from
graphics chipmaker Pixelworks Inc. and raised rougly $1 million in a seed round from Northwest
angel groups Oregon Angel Fund, Bend Venture Conference and Seattle
Alliance of Angels in December 2007.
-- Clifford Carlsen
See July 18 press release from Elemental Technologies
See Sam Blackman's blog
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