When Covid-19 hit, Boulder startup Stream felt a significant hit on its business.
Customers using its in-app messaging and activity feeds began to fold and the company was searching for answers. Then, new revenue opportunities developed from an increasingly virtual world.
“The initial Covid-19 impact was pretty bad,” co-founder and CEO Thierry Schellenbach said. “Then a lot of education startups, health care and religious communities started to adapt to a new online reality. Streaming has been really popular and our growth has exploded over the last three to four months.”
As a result, Stream saw an opportunity to bring on outside capital to fuel this new interest.
Because Covid-19 has forced many of us to go virtual, Schellenbach was unsure how fundraising would work over Zoom meetings and phone calls. The company’s previous two rounds were raised prior to Covid and involved traditional VC meetings.
“I was initially a little concerned,” he said. “Fundraising has always been an in-person high-touch process. With this round it was only Zoom calls.”
Despite the virtual setting for meetings, the company was able to find interested investors and closed a $15 million Series A round this week.
The round was led by GGV Capital, with participation from new investor 01 Advisors, Knight, seed round lead investor Arthur Ventures and other backers, including Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog, and Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder of GitHub. Tiffany Luck from GGV Capital will join the Stream board of directors.
The company plans to use the funding round to scale its global team across engineering, sales and marketing and to further build out its products.
Stream provides APIs which enable product teams to build chat and activity feeds for their applications quicker and cheaper than in-house development. Customers include Healthline, Powerschool, Stocktwits, Freeletics, Match, TaskRabbit and Dubsmash.
With this round, Stream has raised a total of $20.25 million in outside capital since its founding nearly five years ago.
The company has offices in Boulder and in Amsterdam, where its nearly 60-person staff is split. Schellenbach said the company plans to grow its staff to about 100 by yearend, keeping an even split between the two offices, while also growing Stream’s remote workforce.
