SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Incoming Media, a leading mobile video engagement platform, announced that it has closed a $4.9M Series A financing round led by Australian venture capital firm OneVentures and Intel Capital, Intel Corp.'s global investment organization. The funds will be used to expand Incoming Media’s research and development efforts and extend the company’s reach into new geographic and vertical markets.
Using predictive data analytics and intelligent push technology, Incoming Media enables the creation of flawless, personalized mobile video experiences that lead to significantly longer engagement times, more revenue opportunities, and new mobile video business models. Incoming Media’s on-device machine learning predicts consumers’ preferences and pre-loads video content onto users’ mobile devices during the most cost-effective hours; this spares mobile viewers the frustration of searching for video content, enduring stalls or failures, and paying for expensive data streaming.
“Mobile is the future of video, but the viewing experience is broken,” said Incoming Media CEO Adam S. Tom. “Today’s content delivery networks don’t offer the certainty required for consistent, high-quality viewing of mobile video. Acting like a DVR for on-demand content on your mobile devices, Incoming Media solves this problem by intelligently pre-positioning video content onto mobile devices ahead of time, in the background, and at the lowest-cost times before a viewer wants to watch it. This action ensures a TV-like experience and delivers personalized, high-quality video any time, anywhere, every time.”
Said Mark Yahiro, Managing Director of New Business in Intel’s Perceptual Computing Group: “Our vision is to enhance natural human perception with affective computing and machine learning capabilities. Imagine being able to truly personalize your viewing experience and recommendations from your real interactions.”
“Intel Capital has been working to find and support startups addressing these important challenges,” Yahiro added. Intel Capital’s investment was led by Directors Stephen Saltzman and Marlon Nichols.
“As a spin-out of Australia's National ICT Center of excellence, we know and respect the world-class caliber of Incoming’s founders and technology,” said Dr. Michelle Deaker, Managing Director and CEO of OneVentures. “The need to deliver a great mobile experience is growing, with Forrester Research predicting a $32 billion market for mobile engagement providers in 2018. We believe Incoming has significant potential to be a key provider in this market and we are delighted to support this great team in the next phase of Incoming’s development.”
Incoming Media currently brings its technology to market through two solutions – Smart Mobile DVR and Push Video Notifications. Together, these solutions help mobile video app publishers to not only create a new, flawless mobile video experience that attracts new users, but also to then re-engage their user base and significantly increase user retention. Incoming Media’s technology is implemented in a lightweight SDK that can be quickly integrated into third party mobile apps, while allowing those apps to continue using their existing infrastructure, such as content management systems, CDNs, players and DRMs.
Incoming’s Smart Mobile DVR solution allows mobile video app publishers to predict which videos from the video sources associated with the app will be of high interest to the viewer and then intelligently pre-load those videos on to the viewer’s mobile device. Incoming’s Smart Mobile DVR delivers a new mobile experience that attracts viewers to the app and adds convenience, true portability and certainty to the mobile experience. Ensuring the viewer has a great mobile video experience every time, regardless of where they are or what network connection they have, the Incoming platform helps app publishers to increase engagement times and maximize revenue opportunities.
Incoming’s Push Video Notifications solution re-engages viewers with an app. Users go to their mobile devices over 100 times a day for updates and entertainment, providing app publishers with dozens of opportunities per day to re-engage viewers. Incoming utilizes the existing notification system in the mobile device’s OS to push short-form video clips to users. Through the use of predictive analytics, the Incoming platform determines the best content and time for the notification to maximize click-through rates and app re-engagement, significantly increasing notification click-through rates, retention and app opens.
About Incoming Media
Incoming is the leading mobile video engagement platform, using predictive data analytics and intelligent content pre-loading to enable the creation of personalized, flawless mobile video experiences. Through the use of on-device, energy-efficient machine learning and context-based predictive data analytics, the Incoming platform learns and understands how each viewer consumes video on his or her mobile device and applies this information to deliver a personalized mobile video experience with no interruption. Utilizing the Incoming platform, app publishers and content owners can capitalize on the rapid growth of mobile video, delivering a superior viewing experience that will consistently engage viewers and open new revenue opportunities.
Incoming Media is a spin-out of NICTA, Australia’s leading national research lab comprised of approximately 450 PhDs, scientists and engineers specializing in data science, machine learning and data networking. Investors include OneVentures, Intel Capital, NICTA, the Citrix Startup Accelerator and Warner Bros. Incoming is headquartered in Sydney, Australia and San Francisco, California. Learn more at www.incoming-media.com.
About Intel Capital
Intel Capital, Intel's global investment organization, makes equity investments in innovative technology start-ups and companies worldwide. Intel Capital invests in a broad range of companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting enterprise, mobility, consumer Internet, digital media and semiconductor manufacturing. Since 1991, Intel Capital has invested more than US$11 billion in over 1,400 companies in 57 countries. In that timeframe, 209 portfolio companies have gone public on various exchanges around the world and 363 were acquired or participated in a merger. In 2013, Intel Capital invested US$333 million in 146 investments with approximately 49 percent of funds invested outside North America. For more information on Intel Capital and its differentiated advantages, visit www.intelcapital.com or follow @Intelcapital.
About OneVentures
OneVentures is a leading Australian venture capital firm that invests in emerging high growth Australian companies with differentiated products in the information technology and life sciences sectors targeting large addressable global markets. OneVentures is managed by a team of partners with a track record of hands-on business execution and operational management: a unique blend of highly successful entrepreneurs, technology business founders and corporate executives with a strong scientific pedigree, extensive off-shore experience and networks (their achievements include major exits via M&A, significant NASDAQ listings and turnarounds, Boards of listed $Billions companies). This skill-set makes the team ideally suited to supporting and mentoring entrepreneurial management to help them drive growth and create value in their companies and subsequently, through leveraging collective experience, reduce portfolio company risk and enhance portfolio returns for OneVentures’ investors. OneVentures holds $110M in funds under management and was the recipient of an Australian Government Innovation Investment Fund Licence (IIF) in 2010. The firm’s investors include the elite of Australia’s high networth and family offices. OneVentures recently announced first close on its new $100M Innovation and Growth Fund. Read more about OneVentures at www.one-ventures.com.
