UK teleconference company StarLeaf, which sells cloud-based video and conferencing services to businesses, has taken on its first external capital close to a decade after first being founded, back in 2008. The $40 million round is co-led by Highland Europe and Grafton Capital.
StarLeaf, which was founded by three telecoms and video conferencing entrepreneurs who together previously founded and sold three other networking companies (Madge Networks, Calista and Codian), started selling cloud services to customers in 2013 — and says usage of its platform is now doubling year over year.
Its sales pitch is interoperability with “every” third-party meeting/conferencing technology, atop a fully owned and operated global video comms network, called the StarLeaf OpenCloud platform. It says this network has full redundancy and duplication across its eight points of presence across North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia; industry standard AES-128 encryption covering all video conferences and calls; “exceptional” quality of service and call quality regardless of network, via use of technologies such as resilient codecs and dynamic bandwidth management; a single dashboard-based management portal for granularly controlling deployments; and a focus on offering user-friendly, rich end-point features such as screen sharing; the ability to transfer videocalls to other…