Open-Source Web Video Platform Kaltura Raises $20 Million

Kaltura, a company focusing on online video and providing an open-source platform for web video, has announced that it has raised $20 million in venture capital funding, it's biggest round yet.

Kaltura will use the money to continue to fund its fast growth of the past year or so. Nexus Venture Partners lead the round with Intel Capital participating. Existing investors .406 Ventures and Avalon Ventures also contributed.

"Kaltura is disrupting the online video space in a similar way to how open-source Red Hat and MySQL have disrupted their fields of operating systems and databases," said Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura Chairman & CEO.

"We are honored to have gained the support of Intel Capital and Nexus Venture Partners who have played an important role in the success of these two open-source giants," he added.

"Kaltura's financial success and the premium investors that it attracts demonstrate once again that there is indeed no dissonance between doing good, and doing well," he continued.

Kaltura boasts that it is now the biggest online video management platform in use. The company says that its technology is used by over 100,000 publishers.

Among notable users, Kaltura lists Fox, Paramount, HBO, Warner Brothers, The Times of India, Best Buy, Texas Instruments, Coldwell Banker, MIT, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, NYU, Columbia University and Siemens.

The company releases its main software under an open source license, explaining its popularity. However, Kaltura also offers video hosting solutions, based on its own platform, as well as other premium, paid services.

The open-source license also enables organizations like Wikimedia to employ Kaltura technology to power video capabilities on sites such as Wikipedia and others that use the MediaWiki platform. Adobe also uses some Kaltura HTML5 video technology.

To keep up with its popularity, Kaltura has hired aggressively in 2010 and wants to continue to do so in 2011. It went from 40 employees to 80 in the last year and it wants to almost double that again this year, to reach 150 employees.