Ooyala is a venture-backed

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

, privately held company

Privately held company

A privately held company or close corporation is a business company owned either by non-governmental organizations or by a relatively small number of shareholders or company members which does not offer or trade its company stock to the general public on the stock market exchanges, but rather the...

 that provides online video technology products and services. The company was founded in 2007 by brothers Bismarck Lepe

Bismarck Lepe

Bismarck Lepe is an information technology CEO and product manager.Prior to founding Ooyala with Sean Knapp and Belsasar Lepe , Bismarck worked at Google as a Senior Product Manager responsible for the development and launch of monetization products for the Google AdSense network...

 and Belsasar Lepe, and their colleague and friend from Google

Google

Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

, Sean Knapp. The word ooyala means 'cradle' in Telugu

Telugu language

Telugu is a Central Dravidian language primarily spoken in the state of Andhra Pradesh, India, where it is an official language. It is also spoken in the neighbouring states of Chattisgarh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Orissa and Tamil Nadu...

.

As of early 2010, Ooyala was providing video technology and services to deliver online video for over 500 companies, including News International, Yahoo! Japan, TechCrunch and GigaOM. The company has over 125 employees across its offices in Mountain View, California, New York, Los Angeles, London, Sydney, Guadalajara and Tokyo.

History

In January 2007, Bismarck Lepe was working for Google. While developing new monetization techniques for YouTube

YouTube

YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....

, he came up with the idea of using computer vision

Computer vision

Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...

 techniques to deliver targeted advertising on TV shows recorded on Tivo

TiVo

TiVo is a digital video recorder developed and marketed by TiVo, Inc. and introduced in 1999. TiVo provides an on-screen guide of scheduled broadcast programming television programs, whose features include "Season Pass" schedules which record every new episode of a series, and "WishList"...

. He contacted his brother Belasar and a friend, Sean Knapp, to discuss his idea.

The company was initially focused on applying computer vision techniques to create clickable

Clickable

A clickable is any active area in a graphical user interface for a game or application that can be triggered or activated by the user, usually by a click of a mouse. This is the primary method of user interaction. The number of clickables is roughly proportional to the complexity of game play and...

 video. As the company grew, it has expanded its scope to develop technologies that improve the quality and speed at which online video is delivered, allow Web publishers to measure, monetize and optimize their video content, and enable viewers to enjoy a personalized video experience.

In its first round of funding, Ooyala raised money from a number of angel investors and businesspeople, including Scott Flanders, CEO of Playboy Enterprises; Tim Koogle, Former CEO of Yahoo!

Yahoo!

Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...

; and Oliver Grace, Kip Hagopian, Fred Warren, and Ron Conway

Ron Conway

Ron Conway is an American angel investor, often described as one of the "super angels". Conway is recognized as a strong networker and is based in Silicon Valley.-Early career:...

. Eight months later, Ooyala raised an additional $8.5 million from Sierra Ventures. Two more successful rounds of fund-raising followed, through 2011. Through September 2010, Ooyala had raised $42 million from Sage Venture Partners, Sierra Ventures, Rembrandt Ventures, CID Group (a Shanghai-based private equity fund), Hitochu and Panasonic

Panasonic

Panasonic is an international brand name for Japanese electric products manufacturer Panasonic Corporation, which was formerly known as Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd...

.

The company has grown from a single-office startup to one with eight offices, 125 employees and customers in over 20 different countries. More than half of Ooyala's business now comes from international markets.

Jay Fulcher, formerly of Agile, Peoplesoft, and SAP, joined Ooyala as the company’s CEO in August 2009.

Products

Ooyala's main offering is a platform that enable Web sites to publish, manage, monetize, and analyze online video content. It is built to be modular and provides real-time analysis capability to its customers.

In 2010, the company deployed one of the first large-scale Cassandra clusters for its analytics and video transcoding services.

Partners

The service is used by the Times Group of India, Disney, News Corp, TechCrunch and The Telegraph.

In February 2011, Ooyala announced a multi-year parntership with Yahoo! Japan.

Ooyala works with a number of partners, including Adobe, Microsoft, NTT, YuMe, Tremor Media, Akamai, Level3 and Google.