Daily.co just raised a fresh $4.6M for their video chat API

Daily.co created an API for adding video chat to any website or app quickly and easily. The round was led by Freestyle Ventures (freestyle.vc) and while the news broke today, the round was actually closed in January.

Prior to this round Daily.co had raised $2.5M so the total funding to-date now sits at $7.1M. No surprisingly, the company has seen usage spike considerably over the last couple of months, which the founder Kwindla Hultman Kramer noted hit 12x usage growth in the last six weeks alone 🔥

Of course, whenever I see a company raising millions of dollars branding on a non .COM I always look to see what’s going on with the matching .COM. In this case nothing which means they don’t have to worry about getting confused with a competitor but they might have to worry about the current owner seeing all the money they’re raising and upping the price.

At the same time, Zoom became a billion dollar company without their .COM so Daily.co might be planning to follow the same path. What I found the most interesting about Daily.co’s founding story is their initial foray into hardware:

Daily.co’s path to an API-powered service was not as simple as you’d imagine. In fact, it’s the first startup I’ve ever spoken to that used a hardware product as a temporary method of funding itself.

According to Kramer, his company built and sold a video-conferencing hardware box that it sold for a few hundred dollars and a regular stream of SaaS payments (you can read more about it here, and here, if you want to go spelunking). The income its boxes generated helped the startup keep at its longer-term plan of building a WebRTC-powered API.(Source – TechCrunch)

It goes to show that some of the best founders know when and how to pivot, and when it’s done right, there can be a rocket ship waiting on the other side 🚀 Congrats to Kwindla and team, really interesting to read about the journey of how they got to where they are today, looking forward to following along with the journey…which something tells me also will involve scooping up Daily.com 🤷‍♂️

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton