Userful announced two pieces of news today; that we’ve completed our first round of funding and added three new highly experienced executives to our board of directors. Together, additional funding and expertise will help sustain our position as the natural Visual Networking Platform of choice, based on our AV-over-IP technology expertise and strong partnerships.

The raise is led by Accelerate Fund II—where Userful is the Fund’s largest single investment to date—which is managed by Yaletown Partners, Canada’s leading emerging growth investment fund. It is also supported by The A100, an angel co-investment network that invests in Alberta-based companies.

Funding Raise to Enhance Userful’s Market Position

Userful is well positioned to take advantage of the tsunami-like growth in visual communications. Cisco’s recent Visual Networking Index report cites numerous trends in this direction:

  • IP video traffic will represent 82 percent of all global IP traffic (both business and consumer) by 2022, up from 75 percent in 2017. Both global IP video traffic and internet video traffic will grow four-fold from 2017 to 2022, a CAGR of 29 percent and 33 percent respectively.
  • Live Internet video will account for 17 percent of Internet video traffic by 2022. Live video will grow 15-fold from 2017 to 2022.
  • Internet video surveillance traffic will increase sevenfold between 2017 to 2022. Globally, 3 percent of all Internet video traffic will be due to video surveillance by 2022, up from 2 percent in 2017.

Userful also enhanced its market position this week with the announcement that our uClient app now integrates with Userful On-Premise. This allows organizations to connect the on-site server directly to the smart displays, for the more demanding display applications in the enterprise.

Additional Expertise to Support Management Team

We are also announcing exciting additions to our board of directors. Karen Willem currently serves as the Chief Financial Officer for SugarCRM, recently acquired by Accel-KKR, a leading technology-focused private equity firm. Willem is a veteran of the software/SaaS industry, with more than 25 years of experience in finance, sales and general management in both public and private companies.

John LeMoncheck currently serves as President of Keyssa. He has been a leader of companies and business units for more than 25 years across a wide variety of industries, including consumer electronics, wireless and wired communications, semiconductors, smart toys and human interface devices.

David Edmonds is an active member of The A100 and Chair of Accelerate Fund II’s Industry Committee. He is an active mentor of emerging entrepreneurs through The A100 and the Venture Mentoring Service of Alberta (VMSA).

We are excited to put our new funding and board members to work, speeding enhancements to our Visual Networking Platform AV-over-IP architecture. We are also eager to work with our technology and channel partners to introduce organizations worldwide to the features, functionality and benefits of the Visual Networking Platform, which can improve operating efficiency up to 80 percent and reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) by as much as 40 percent.