Highfive garners $32 mln Series B

Redwood City, California-based Highfive, a provider of video conferencing device and cloud software for businesses, has received $32 million in Series B funding. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round with participation from other investors that included Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Aaron Levie of Box and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com.

PRESS RELEASE

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Highfive, the company that created the first beautifully designed video conferencing device and cloud software built for businesses, today announced it has secured $32 million in series B funding led by new investor, Lightspeed Venture Partners. The round also included participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Aaron Levie (Box), Drew Houston (Dropbox), Marc Benioff (Salesforce.com) and Shishir Mehrotra (YouTube).

“We are seeing record growth, and we’re on track to process one million video minutes per week within the first six months of shipping, making Highfive one of the fastest growing business video conferencing providers in the industry.”

Highfive began shipping in December 2014 and within the first 90 days more than 500 of the most innovative companies, such as Patagonia, Slack, Zenefits and Warby Parker have adopted Highfive, with a number of them going wall-to-wall with video conferencing in every meeting room.

“After experiencing the shift in productivity when video conferencing, web conferencing, and screen sharing are made incredibly simple, customers who started with one or two devices have come back to us to put Highfive in every meeting room,” said Shan Sinha, CEO and co-founder of Highfive. “We are seeing record growth, and we’re on track to process one million video minutes per week within the first six months of shipping, making Highfive one of the fastest growing business video conferencing providers in the industry.”

“Zenefits is growing at an unprecedented pace, and we wanted to provide video conferencing capabilities to keep our teams connected across our San Francisco and Scottsdale offices. When we looked at the options, older systems like Polycom and Cisco were too complicated and expensive, so we focused on the newer players,” said Nick Thulin, director of IT for Zenefits. “We chose Highfive because we could easily add the devices to every meeting room, and because of their dedication to adding new features and integrations based on customer feedback, as compared to other players like Google Hangouts. Having Highfive in every meeting room has made video conferencing a daily tool for our employees.”

“We looked at every company in the video conferencing space and invested in Highfive because we saw an amazing product, phenomenal growth, a huge market opportunity and the right team to solve this problem,” said Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and newly appointed board member. “Incumbents like Cisco and Polycom have legacy products that are overpriced, complicated to use, and are out of touch with today’s trends like cloud and mobile. Every one of us has experienced how difficult it can be to connect people at work face-to-face, and at Highfive, I’m excited to play a role in finally solving this for companies large and small.”

The company has raised a total of $45.4 million and is dedicated to serving the 25 million conference rooms that don’t currently have video conferencing and screen sharing capabilities. With this new funding, Highfive aims to double their team of 50 employees this year to support engineering, sales and marketing. Highfive is continuing to focus on providing the best experience for their customers and introducing new features to move toward their goal of making every conversation at work face-to-face.

For additional information, visit: www.highfive.com

About Highfive:
Highfive is a fast growing technology company that makes beautifully simple video conferencing hardware and cloud software. Highfive’s flagship product is an all-in-one video hardware device, which delivers high quality enterprise video conferencing to any size conference room at 1/20th the cost of traditional products. Highfive also provides web conferencing and screen sharing functionality for their personal devices, which gives customers the ability to make one-click video calls and share their screens from their laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. Highfive is based in Redwood City, CA.