Aframe expands with £4.3m funding and US office

The London-based firm is setting up an office in Boston together with data centres in Los Angeles and New York connected by a private fibre network.

The company has raised £4.3m ($7m) of venture capital funding to support the expansion, which will see former Avid Technology head of marketing Mark Overington join as president of Aframe North America.

“This is huge for us,” said founder and chief executive David Peto. “It’s a massive leap forward in terms of our ambition; getting our private cloud up and running in Los Angeles and New York will transform what we offer.”

Aframe allows for broadcast-quality video to be uploaded over the internet or at the company’s network of drop off points.

Peto said interest in the service had come from similar segments to the company’s UK client base.

“We have had a lot of interest from reality TV and ob docs, which we expected,” he told Broadcast.

“But we have been surprised at other areas, particularly sport, and there has been a lot of interest from big corporations and ad agencies that want to make the most of the huge amounts of video they have.”

Ten people will be hired to work at the Boston office, which will take the firm’s overall headcount to 34 by the end of the year, excluding those employed to add tags to content. The company’s upload partners will be announced at trade show NAB later this month.

Peto said the company decided to locate its US HQ in Boston because of the region’s “incredible video history”.

“Avid, Akamai and Signiant are based there and it is the second largest startup centre in the US, with the highest density of VC startups outside Silicon Valley. Also, with MIT and Harvard there is incredible talent there. We don’t have any plans to move our development team from London but it’s logical to be where the talent is based.

“The US is the world’s largest video market, so we want to concentrate on growing in the US but we have already been approached to set up Aframe in other countries, and we are talking to people in France, Holland, Canada and Australia,” Peto said.

Aframe launched in the UK at the end of 2010. Its clients include the BBC, MTV, Zig Zag Productions and Shine Group.