Announcing the Series B of Iris.TV
In February 2015, when Stage Venture Partners was little more than a URL and a PowerPoint deck, I met Field Garthwaite at Zinqué in West Hollywood. The founder of Iris.TV, Field sketched for me a vision of the future of short form video. Publishers would be able to personalize their streams to individual members of their audience, powered by a unique combination of user behavior data, user identification, and video metadata. At a time when the major platforms, dominated by Google and Facebook, were consolidating their grip over media, Field’s vision of a more inclusive ecosystem was compelling.
Stage Venture Partners invested in Iris soon after, in just the second investment since the inception of our firm. Over the last six years, we have watched Field, his co-founder Richie Hyden, and their team navigate a rapidly changing industry. Privacy regulations changed the game, first in Europe, and then in California. The most important platform for video consumption shifted twice, first from social platforms to owned & operated web sites, and then from the web to connected TV (CTV) devices like Roku.
Through every shift in the video landscape, Iris.TV has held true to its twofold mission. First, Iris provides technological tools to publishers to enable a business model in which video journalism and independent media can thrive. Second, Iris provides brands and advertisers with a distribution platform for their messaging that allows them to target audiences with precision, while ensuring that their messages appear alongside content that will not generate controversy, thereby preserving brand standards. In a world of conspiracies, disinformation, and alternative facts, Iris offers an island of truth, accuracy, and safety.
As video consumption moves away from the web and towards CTV platforms, the need for Iris’s technology grows. On the web, brands can validate brand safety and understand the context of a video by reading the text on a page appearing alongside the video. On a connected TV, there is no web page, and there is no text. Marketers need to think inside the video, and Iris gives them the tools to do just that.
Today, Iris announces its Series B, led by Intel Capital. With its new capital, Iris is poised to offer its technology to an ever greater array of partners, from demand side platforms to publishers to CTV companies. The investment will allow Iris to continue to invest in technology to improve contextual relevance, security, and privacy.
In addition to Intel Capital, new investors in the round include WISE Ventures, Quest Venture Partners, and Mirae Asset Venture Investment. We are delighted that these strong new investors are joining us on the Iris.TV cap table. Field and Richie are just getting started in their mission to improve the world of video data, and we are excited for what they are building.