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Qwilt, a maker of networking equipment that helps service providers manage the demand for Internet video, has closed a deal for a $25 million Series D led by Disrupt-ive.
The round brings Qwilt’s total capital raised to $65 million and includes new funding from Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and additional funding from Cisco Investments, the investment arm of the networking equipment giant. Qwilt’s last round of $16 million, closed in 2013, and was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures and Marker LLC are also investors.
Qwilt’s mission is to give service providers like Time Warner, Comcast and others the means to put popular Internet video content close to the users who want to watch it, thus making it easier to deliver. And if you ask Cisco, which tracks this sort of data pretty closely, video will amount to about 80 percent of all traffic globally by 2019, from about 67 percent as of last year.
Qwilt’s Video Fabric software runs on hardware that gets deployed at the neighborhood level, one or two steps up from the cable modem. It grabs the popular stuff that consumers like the most — say, popular video like this one — and maintains a local copy that can be easily streamed from that location without taking up bandwidth on the carrier’s main network infrastructure. The point is to get it closer to the consumer and keep the main pipes on a network less cluttered with video traffic. The company says sales grew by 400 percent last year and that its gear has been deployed by some 80 service providers.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
