AnyDesk, a startup that offers remote desktop software powered by a custom video codec, has secured 6.5 million euros in Series A financing. EQT Ventures is leading the round, with the participation of angel investors, including Chris Hitchen and his former sponsor Andreas Burike.
The Stuttgart, Germany-based company says it will use liquidity injection to further develop the AnyDesk product and develop technical and commercial teams.
"AnyDesk's mission can be summed up in overcoming distances," says co-founder and CEO Philipp Weiser at TechCrunch. "Today, employees need to work with their teams and their content as quickly and efficiently as they work remotely than at the office. Legacy Remote Desktop offers do not allow this – they are complicated, frustrating and slow. At best, you can make a presentation or help a colleague install a printer. Some ideas arose out of frustration and we decided to reconfigure the remote workstation for today 's work place. "
To this end, as well as modern applications for Windows, MacOS, different versions of Linux / Unix, Android and iOS, the AnyDesk team has created a proprietary video codec called "DeskRT" which has been specifically designed for the graphics. User interfaces. It transmits 60 frames per second and prioritizes low latency.
As a result, the boot indicates that users usually enjoy a high quality video and sound, and a transmission of images fast enough and fluid to forget that you are using another computer. Indeed, unlike traditional screen sharing, AnyDesk is designed for collaboration.
"We created AnyDesk so that no matter who, no matter where, could do its job," says Weiser. "More than 50 million users worldwide have downloaded AnyDesk – we have more than 7,000 commercial customers, including Spidercam, Amedes and Sun Chemical."
There is a free version of AnyDesk for personal use, as well as various professional levels, up to the large enterprise use.
Meanwhile, the co-founder of AnyDesk admits that there are a number of other players in the office space rather cluttered remote desktop. They include LogMeIn, TeamViewer, Splashtop and Citrix GoTo. However, he claims that AnyDesk is better than current offerings because the boot approached the remote desktop from a "software design angle" and created a custom video architecture and codec specifically for transmission needs at low latency.
"Some competing products use expensive hardware for this, but this is not the case with AnyDesk – we have achieved superior performance in a software-only solution, which means that AnyDesk offers users the same performance. the experience they expect when they consume content When you're viewing a website or video on your devices, chances are you're not thinking about the web browser or media player running in the background, you are focused on the content, AnyDesk works the same way and works behind the scenes so you can be productive, creative and continue your work. "
As an aside, EQT Ventures talks about how it discovered AnyDesk, particularly through the venture capital company's "Motherbrain" artificial intelligence platform. The software claims to analyze the online technology startup ecosystem for specific signals related to a company's performance. Based on these digital footprints, it then flags the most promising companies and presents the structured and unstructured data relevant to the EQT Ventures team.
Of course, this type of approach is not unique to EQT – most venture capitalists of a certain size use data tracking as part of their discovery and of their evaluation, and the new VCs like InReach Ventures and Fly Ventures this – but it is perhaps nonetheless remarkable.