Telecom Lead America: Juniper Networks, through its Junos
Innovation Fund, will invest in Vidyo, a video conferencing company.
Vidyo announced in September 2011 that it had raised $97
million to accelerate its growth.
Besides Juniper Networks, lead investor QuestMark
Partners and other existing investors Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star
Ventures, and Four Rivers Group are also making investments in Vidyo.
Vidyo did not disclose terms of the investment.
The investment from Juniper Networks enables Vidyo to
increase its go-to-market activities and integrate its video conferencing
products with Juniper’s numerous offerings.
The Vidyo platform allows users to leverage the latest
hardware innovations, new consumer devices and partner applications that utilize
Vidyo’s APIs, such as those that result from the recently announced
relationships with Philips and AMD in the Healthcare industry.
Vidyo is an emerging player that is driving innovation
in software-based videoconferencing, and we believe its leading technology will
improve the experience and economics of video communications alongside advances
in networking technologies,” said Jeff Lipton, vice president, Venture and
Strategic Investments, Juniper Networks.
Infonetics Research said the videoconferencing market
will reach a cumulative $22 billion over the next 5 years.
“Juniper’s investment validates the approach we have
taken to successfully create new video conferencing markets and deliver
superior value, accessibility and scalability to our customers and
partners,” said Ofer Shapiro, Vidyo’s co-founder and CEO.
Vidyo delivers telepresence-quality conferencing to more
than 1850 enterprise, healthcare, education, and government customers. Juniper
Networks is leading the charge to architecting the new network based on a
unique single architecture and single operating system, Junos, that ensures
performance, reliability and security without compromise and at the scale
customers demand.
