Live-streaming platform BoxCast raises $20M

BoxCast, a Cleveland-based company aiming to make it easy to live stream any event, has raised $20 million in Series A funding.

Co-founder and CEO Gordon Daily said that when the company first launched in 2013, “streaming wasn’t something that everyone understood,” and you needed professional help to live stream anything. BoxCast is supposed to make that process accessible to anyone.

The company has created several different video encoder devices, but Daily said the “small box” is just a one piece of BoxCast platform, which is designed to cover all your live-streaming needs, with support for 1080p broadcasting; streaming to Facebook Live, YouTube and your own website; analytics and more — plus there are add-ons like automatic scoreboard displays and event ticketing.

Pricing starts at $99 per month for the “essential” streaming plan, plus $399 for a BoxCast encoder. (You can also just stream from an iOS device.)

And it’s no surprise that 2020 has been a “watershed moment” for the company, as Daily put it, with BoxCast now live streaming millions of events per year — everything from sports to religious services to virtual safaris offered by Sri Lanka’s tourism board.

“When you can’t even meet in-person … we knew that there was going to be higher usage,” he said. “What caught me off-guard was the volume increase — it’s new customers, it’s existing customers, at peak times there’s a 10x increase [from pre-pandemic usage].”

And while in-person events will hopefully become more common next year, Daily said live streams will still be a valuable tool to reach audiences who can’t attend, and to promote your business or organization with new kinds of programming.

COO Sam Brenner added that while BoxCast employed fewer than 40 people before the pandemic, the team has grown to 56, and will likely double within the next 12 months.

The Series A was led by Updata Partners, with participation from audio equipment manufacturer Shure.