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These teleconferencing stalwarts have just raised $40m for their latest video conferencing platform

The three veteran founders behind cloud-based video conferencing platform, StarLeaf, have raised $40m in a funding round co-led by Highland Europe and Grafton Capital.

Co-founders William MacDonald, who is Chief Technology Officer, Mark Loney, who is Chief Executive Officer and Mark Richer, who is Executive Chairman, all have pedigree building up networking companies, having previously worked together at Madge Networks, Calista and Codian.

Their latest venture, which is the fourth the trio have founded, began offering its services in early 2013 and since then has rapidly grown its customer base with clients in over 50 countries across the world.

The Cambridge-based company has developed a platform which provides enterprise businesses with video connectivity and calling services from the cloud, which StarLeaf claims can easily integrate with a company’s legacy systems and is a significantly cheaper option than developing their own video infrastructure themselves.

Today’s investment round, which also included participation from the founders, marks the first time the company has taken outside investment and will be used to accelerate its growth in its key European and North American markets, and support its push into Asia Pacific.

Expanding on their approach, Mark Loney said that StarLeaf, which is headquartered in Watford and has a research centre in Cambridge, is capitalising on the increasing preference towards video conferencing over voice calls or conferencing at enterprise level.

He said: “Enterprises are shifting towards video as it is a much better means of communication than a voice call or conference. However, businesses often have a variety of legacy systems making it difficult to connect with customers and suppliers who may have different systems.

“Our cloud service solves these issues, while taking away the pain of running your own back-end systems. This new funding will take us through our investment phase and give us the working capital we need to reach our potential in markets around the world.”

Highland Europe’s Laurence Garnett will become non-executive director at StarLeaf following this tranche of investment, and the Highland partner commented that the business, and their experience executive team, had been on the investor’s radar for a number of years.

He added: “I am so thrilled to be investing in StarLeaf today as I have followed Mark Richer and the team for 12 years and have been a StarLeaf customer since 2013. StarLeaf has built its solution from the ground up which gives it a real advantage in ease of use and quality.

“It offers real interoperability between different vendors which is unique in this marketplace and is delivering really high quality calls and a brilliant level of service.”

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