INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
AnyDesk, a startup that offers remote desktop software powered by a bespoke video codec, has scored €6.5 million in Series A funding
Leading the round is EQT Ventures, with participation from angel investors, including Chris Hitchen, and previous backer Andreas Burike.
The
Stuttgart, Germany-based company says it will use the injection of cash for further development of the AnyDesk product and to grow the
technical and commercial teams.
&AnyDesk mission can be summarised as overcoming distances,& co-founder and CEO Philipp Weiser tells
&Today, people need to work with their teams and content just as quickly and effectively when working remotely as they do when in the office
Legacy remote desktop offerings do not enable this — they are complicated, frustrating and slow
At best, you can do a presentation or help a colleague install a printer
Some ideas are born out of frustration and we decided to re-engineer the remote desktop for today workplace&.
To that end, as well as
modern-day apps for Windows, MacOS, various flavours of Linux/Unix, Android and iOS, the AnyDesk team has created a proprietary video codec
called &DeskRT& that has been engineered especially for graphical user interfaces
It transmits 60 frames per seconds and prioritises low latency.
As a result, the startup says users generally experience high quality video
and sound, and image transmission that is fast and fluid enough to forget that you are using a different computer
That because, unlike traditional screen sharing, AnyDesk is built for collaboration.
&We created AnyDesk so that anyone, anywhere can get
their work done,& says Weiser
&More than 50 million users worldwide have downloaded AnyDesk
We have more than 7,000 business customers, including Spidercam, Amedes and Sun Chemical&.
There is a free version of AnyDesk for personal
use, and various professional tiers, all the way up to large enterprise use.
Meanwhile, the AnyDesk co-founder concedes that there a number
of other players in the rather crowded remote desktop software space
They include LogMeIn, TeamViewer, Splashtop, and Citrix GoTo
However, he claims AnyDesk is better than current offerings as the startup has approached the remote desktop from a &software-design focused
angle& and created an architecture and a custom video codec specifically for the purpose of low latency transmission.
&Some competing
products use expensive hardware for this, but this is not the case with AnyDesk
We&ve achieved superior performance in a software-only solution
This means AnyDesk provides people with the experience they&ve come to expect when consuming content
When you view a website or video on your devices, chances are you don&t think about the web browser or media player working in the
You are focused on the content
AnyDesk works in the same way, running behind-the-scenes so you can be productive, creative and get on with your work&.
As an aside, EQT
Ventures is talking up the way it discovered AnyDesk, namely via the VC firm &Motherbrain& AI platform
The software claims to scan the tech startup ecosystem online for specific signals related to a company performance
Based on these digital footprints, it then flags the most promising companies and surfaces the relevant structured and unstructured data to
the EQT Ventures team.
Of course, this sort of approach isn&t unique to EQT — most VC firms of a certain size use data tracking as part of
their deal discovery and evaluation, and newer VCs such as InReach Ventures and Fly Ventures make a virtue of this — but it is perhaps
