Lightstream, a Chicago-based live video startup, announced it has raised $8 million in Series A funding. This round of funding was led by Drive Capital. Drive Capital, MK Capital, and Pritzker Group contributed $6 million and Silicon Valley Bank provided the rest.
Including this round, Lightstream has raised $9.8 million since it was founded in 2015. In conjunction with this round of funding, Drive Capital general partner Andy Jenks is joining the Lightstream board.
What makes Lightstream different? The company makes it easier for social live streamers to distribute professional content to their followers and makes it seamless to stream live on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and Mixer from any location.
Lightstream Studio was built for personal chat shows and Lightstream Prism enables up to four gamers to participate in a live multi-stream broadcast.
Last year, Lightstream saw tremendous growth after forming an exclusive partnership with Microsoft’s Mixer streaming platform according to StreamingMedia.com. Microsoft integrated Lightstream Server into the Xbox and Windows native broadcasting software. As a result, Lightstream quadrupled its audience of video creators in a year.
With this funding round, Lightstream will be building up its engineering team, expand internationally, and bring on Jennifer Farver as CTO. Farver is the former CTO of Popular Pays and is an adjunct professor of data analytics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. And Lightstream will be launching tools for brands and developers later this year.
“We are also able to globally expand by making all platforms accessible to content creators in SEA and South America in 2019,” said Lightstream CEO Stu Grubbs in a statement. “Lightstream currently is available (has servers) in North America and throughout Europe. Additionally, we will be partnering/acquiring tools that will offer content creators using the Lightstream Studio platform to understand their audience/viewers and support those content creators on ways to continue their growth and monetization.”
