Mux, a company offering tooling and insights for API-based video sharing, reported this morning that it has completed a $37 million Series C round of funding.
Andreessen Horowitz led the team, which featured both Accel and Cobalt attendance. Mux previously raised a round of around $20 million in mid-2019, before this funding round. In all, according to data from PitchBook, the organization had earned a hair under $32 million before its Series C.
The Mux round lands are in the midst of a variety of developments that we at TechCrunch are monitoring here, namely API-based startups that are currently hot as a collective, and startups that are supporting a growing digital revolution.
Let’s explore a little of Mux’s history and then analyze how its fresh injection of funding is clarified by the present pace of the sales growth of the company.
FROM EXITS THROUGH APIS, THROUGH AUTOMATION
TechCrunch talked about the round with Mux’s creator Jon Dahl, curious about how the firm came to be. Back in the early 2010s, Dahl was a co-founder of Zencoder which sold to Brightcove. When Zencoder released, TechCrunch said it aimed to “be the video encoding Amazon Web Services.” It ended up selling for $30 million, an amount that was a little bit bigger in 2012 when the deal was revealed.
For a couple of years, Dahl hung around Brightcove because the angel was investing. Then, he formed Mux in late 2015. Firstly, the new startup developed an analytics platform named Mux Info. Dahl said the analytics software was needed because the online video will not fit well with more traditional tools like Google Analytics.
Mux Data is software that is SaaS. But what makes Mux more fascinating is its on-demand infra-play, Mux Video in particular.
Mux Content is distributed to other organizations via an API, serving both live and on-demand content. The startup wants to say that what Stripe has done for payments is doing for film, namely taking a packet of difficulty and pain, wresting it into form, then offer it via a developer-friendly hook.
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But I met up with Kristina Shen, a general partner at the investment company, to better grasp it all the same. Shen emphasized that before the pandemic, Mux was going in the right direction, but that COVID has increased the importance of video in how humans communicate with each other — an exponential secular change for Mux to surf, that is.
COVID helped Mux by announcing its new investment, highlighting that its “social media users [have] seen a 118% rise in video sharing since mid-February, while exercise and wellness sharing increased by 162%, e-learning increased by 230%, and religious streams leaped by nearly 3 orders of magnitude.”
During our call, Shen said Mux is one of the fastest-growing SaaS businesses her firm has seen.
Conclusion:
Finally, when asked about the gross margins of Mux, Shen said the product, including Twilio and Stripe, would ultimately look similar to other businesses in the infra-space. This fits what Dahl said about this paper, but the author had a nice wrinkle in it. 
