Company Raises $50 Million Round Led by Battery Ventures to Build
the Global Platform for Business Collaboration
September 18, 2013— MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA – Blue Jeans Network, the global leader in interoperable video collaboration services, today announced it has secured $50 million in new funding led by Battery Ventures with participation from previous investors Accel Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Norwest Venture Partners. The financing cements Blue Jeans’ position as a transformative leader poised to capitalize on the rapidly shifting landscape in business collaboration and unified communications. The new funding arrives as the company is experiencing record growth across all facets of its business, including customers, users, usage, bookings, and revenues, largely at the expense of industry incumbents like Cisco and Polycom. Blue Jeans also announced today it has surpassed 2,000 businesses and 3 million participants consuming more than 100 million minutes annually. The new funding will accelerate this growth with domestic and global market expansion as well as support ongoing product innovation that sets the standard for business collaboration.
“Blue Jeans Network is the new face of business collaboration. The company’s cloud-based, interoperable solution was a shock to the system of the traditional video and web conferencing markets and quickly made Blue Jeans a leader in the space,” said Roger Lee, general partner, Battery Ventures. “Along the way, Blue Jeans set a new standard for SaaS business models with exceptional revenue growth and retention rates that rivals companies like Salesforce and Workday at similar stages. Now Blue Jeans is redefining the video conferencing and business collaboration markets, expanding the parameters with an eye toward replacing every phone call with a face-to-face Blue Jeans meeting.”
Fueled by the growing desire for a single, scalable, easy-to-use service for face-to-face collaboration and rich content sharing across conference rooms, desktops, and mobile devices, Blue Jeans is bridging the gap between increasingly dispersed social and business networks. The recent round of funding, led by Roger Lee of Battery Ventures, brings the total overall financing for Blue Jeans to nearly $100 million. In addition to supporting innovation, the funding will fuel market expansion with new offices in San Francisco and new operations in Europe and Australia.
The Internet flattened the world, democratizing information and access, but it also introduced a layer of anonymity that negatively impacts communication. Studies prove that face-to-face video helps people meaningfully connect, reducing hostility, fostering empathy and improving communication. In the last two years, more than 2,000 diverse businesses, ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 100, have been using Blue Jeans to improve their businesses. Over three million participants from customers such as Edelman, Facebook, Match.com, Noble Energy, Opower, and Stanford University have conducted nearly two million meetings with Blue Jeans.
“Collaboration in emails or via phone is OK, but having that personal, visual communication is massively better. Every aspect of our business is visual, and having the ability to see each other, collaborate on a project and build a meaningful connection improves the process of working together and with our clients,” said Heather Potter, Vice President, IT Planning and Special Projects, HKS Inc., a global architecture firm. “With Blue Jeans, we have a new way to collaborate that is just as easy as picking up the phone but exponentially more powerful.”
“From the beginning, we focused on making video collaboration about the meeting participant. Up until now, traditional methods have been elitist, complex and leave the participant at the mercy of the physical location of the device,” said Krish Ramakrishnan, co-founder and CEO of Blue Jeans Network. “Our new way of thinking has captured more than one-third of the video conferencing services market in just two years. With billions of camera-enabled devices in the workforce, all it takes is Blue Jeans to turn any internet connection into a more impactful face-to-face meeting. Our aim is to transform every distributed meeting into a video meeting, and continue to push the boundaries of visual business collaboration.”
“Today businesses are more geographically dispersed, travel is down, and two-way cameras are prolific,” said Rich Costello, Analyst, IDC. “By embracing the cloud and focusing on interoperability, Blue Jeans is potentially turning every device into a high quality, low-cost video conferencing tool. Having the ability to chat face-to-face anytime, anywhere will help businesses better connect and collaborate with their employees and partners—regardless of location.”
About Blue Jeans Network
At Blue Jeans Network, our mission is to make video communications as easy and pervasive as audio communications, enabling more effective collaboration at work, at home, and on the road. Our cloud-based conferencing service makes this possible by enabling customers to connect with each other seamlessly anytime, anywhere, and from practically any device. The Blue Jeans Network extends high quality video communications beyond the traditional boundaries of specialized conference rooms and into the mainstream, allowing individuals and employees throughout an enterprise to interact more effectively with each other, and with their customers, partners, suppliers, family, and friends. Blue Jeans Network is a private company headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information go to: http://bluejeans.com or follow the company @BlueJeansNet
Morgan Mathis
Highwire for Blue Jeans Network
415-963-4174 x37
morgan@bordersgratehouse.com
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