Platform as a service (PaaS) Laminar has raised $5.11 million in seed funding led by Artha India Ventures (AIV) and Leo Capital, Garuda Ventures, Cloudcap. The round also saw participation from Sampson Acquisitions, Inc. According to the company, this raise will accelerate product development and market expansion.
Laminar will immensely benefit from the collective experience of the investors in rapidly scaling its business and expanding their global footprint, Narendra Nag, co-founder and CEO, Laminar, said. “In Nielsen’s recent State of Play report the number of people subscribing to four or more services has more than doubled in the US — this is a secular trend around the world. Such growth will only accelerate as consumers coalesce around (and pay for) content that speaks to their cultural reality,” he added.
Founded in 2020 by Narendra Nag, Raheel Khursheed, Tirthraj Singh, Kumar Shorav, and Yin Shanyang, London-based Laminar enables content owners to launch a global over-the-top (OTT) service in 12-weeks or less. It takes over the heavy lifting of creating back-end technologies from OTT players so that they can focus on their core business of content creation. Media companies get the ability to customise and launch apps across all classes of devices, set up multiple types of monetization options, meet all tax and compliance requirements, and get a complete data and analytics suite at zero CAPEX. The company claims to have enabled Chaupal, a multi-regional OTT platform from India, to launch in 110 countries in 12 weeks, four times faster than the average industry timeframe.
“This is the first significant investment in Europe of Artha India Ventures. “Laminar gives content creators the backbone to challenge the duopoly of Netflix and Amazon Prime by building zero code cloud-based PaaS offering. We were pleasantly surprised by the width of their client base that needs Laminar to solve their pressing issue. Moreover, we see immense potential in the OTT-enabler ecosystem,” Anirudh A Damani, director, Artha India Ventures, said.
For Rajul Garg, founding partner, Leo Capital, media companies can see content consumption rapidly shifting away from cable, satellite, and DTH worldwide. “Laminar has timed this industry transition beautifully with a product that is ready today for media companies who don’t want to spend time and money re-inventing the wheel, and we are excited to partner with them to help create the next global leader in the media-tech space,” he highlighted.
Laminar has a presence in London, Toronto, Wroclaw, Dubai, New Delhi, and Singapore and an engineering team based out of Wroclaw and Barcelona.
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