Background

Ooyala was founded in early 2007 by Sean Knapp, Belsasar Lepe and Bismarck Lepe - all former Google employees. While at Google, they worked on the development and launch of various monetization and content distribution products such as AdSense, AdWords and Google Web Search. After four years of engineering and product development at the biggest Internet company in the world, the three left Google to start Ooyala. Ooyala has raised over 10 million dollars in funding and has in excess of 5000 publishers using its syndication platform - Backlot. Ooyala's goal is to build a successful technology company that focuses on delivering the best video experience to video content providers, advertisers and most importantly consumers.

The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California with a sales presence in Los Angeles and in New York City.

The Business

Ooyala focuses on building video syndication and monetization solutions for the distribution of high quality video content. Ooyala Backlot is our video publisher platform that content owners use to upload, manage, syndicate, monetize and analyze the distribution of their content. Ooyala's strategy has been to build products and solutions that are simple to access and use. We don't have complicated pricing models and none of Backlot's functionality is hidden behind a service layer. Ooyala has over 5000 Backlot users in 17 different countries and a reach of over 5 million unique viewers.

Oh, and the name...

Ooyala means cradle in Telugu, a Southern Indian language. We like the name because it demonstrates what we are doing -- cradling a new form of innovation.