Livestorm Raises $30m in a Series B Round to Disrupt Market Dominated by Zoom

Livestorm, a video communication startup has announced that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding to expand its video meeting services.

“I’m pleased to announce our latest funding round. We’ve raised a $30 million Series B to accelerate product development and our expansion into North America,” said CEO Gilles Barteux.

The round was raised by Aglae Ventures and Bpifrance Digital Venture, with participation from Raise Ventures and IDInvest. The latest funding brings Livestorm’s total amount raised to date to $35 million.

Founded four years ago, Livestorm has been the preferred solution for rapidly changing industries like state and local governments, healthcare, education, and more.

The company said it will be using the latest funding to expand its technology to accommodate more companies and users.

“We’ll be using this latest funding round to develop new features and functionalities to support larger companies. We will create an ecosystem of integrations entirely dedicated to video communication. We believe that the next wave of video communication platforms will focus on more than just video distribution,” it said.

As part of its expansion plan, Livestorm said it will increase its marketing presence and scale go-to-market strategies toward mid-market and enterprise clients in Europe and the United States, while hiring aggressively globally.

The company said it has multiplied its revenue 8x since last fall when it raised its €4.6 million Series A fund. It now has a customer base of over 3,500 customers, including Shopify, Honda, Sephora and Fortune 500 companies.

Bertaux told TechCrunch’s Anthony Ha that Livestorm moved from Webinars that it started with to video meeting services.

Livestorm is using an approach different from the traditional teleconferencing technology. The company had used the technology for conducting interviews and sees the product as different from Zoom, Skype and Webex.

“The way we think about it is, webinars and meetings are not use cases,” said Bertaux.

He argued that it’s more meaningful to talk about whether you’re having a team meeting or a training demo or whatever else, and then how many people you want to attend, with Livestorm supporting all those use cases and meeting sizes through different templates.

“We’re trying to remove the semantic distinction of meeting and webinar out of the equation,” Bertaux added.

The video conferencing service is browser based, a sharp contrast with other video tools. It does not require installation of software to be used by presenters or attendees.

While Bertaux acknowledges the dominance of Zoom, saying the company may have built “the best video meeting technology,” he suggested that there has been a shift in the status quo. “The thing is, we’re entering a period where video is becoming a commodity.”

The twist in the technology is that Livestorm is less focused on the core video technology and more on the experience around the video, with in-meeting features like screen sharing and virtual background, as well as a broader suite of marketing tools that allow customers to continue delivering targeted message to event attendees, TechCrunch explained.

Bertaux said it’s like Hubspot, which “didn’t reinvent landing pages” but put the pieces of the marketing stack together around those landing pages.

“In 2021, we want to have the biggest ecosystem of integration on a video product,” he said.

The company is poised to cause disruption in the video conferencing space where Zoom reigns supreme.

The Aglaé Venture partner Cyril Guenoun called Livestorm storm “the HubSpot for video communication.” He added that “video and online events have become essential in 2020, and are here to stay. The Livestorm platform thrives in this environment, providing a seamless solution for meetings and events with all the connectors that marketing, sales, customer service and HR pros need to make video a tightly integrated part of their communications,” he said.