Industry veterans poised to bring the variety of broadband Internet video to your home TV
By Allan Maurer
You feel like you’re on top of the world. When we visited Clearleap in the Tech Square Research Building in downtown Atlanta, CEO Braxton Jarrett and marketing manager Laney Woolfolk took to the roof of the building that is home to Atlanta Technology Development Center companies. We enjoyed a sunny spring view of the city spread before us, much as Clearleap sees the future of video spread before it.
Clearleap has a bright vision of a world with converged video and broadband Internet. Its technology expands the capabilities of traditional TV delivered by existing service providers, bringing the depth and variety of Internet video to home screens.
Clearleap CEO Braxton Jarrett and Laney Woolfolk marketing manager on the roof of the Tech Square Research Building in Atlanta.
Clearleap’s technology allows those providers, such as cable companies, to offer the enhanced services without replacing existing set-top boxes, something they are reluctant to do. “That is a big issue with cable providers. They don’t want to replace all those boxes,” says CEO Braxton Jarratt.
The company sells a platform that sits in the cloud, managed from three data centers around the country. A small appliance sits on a client’s network and allows the provider to offer tens of thousands of additional video choices to subscribers.
That includes net video not usually available on TV, personalized video choices so every viewer in a home can watch what they want, local video programs, special sporting event broadcasts and more.
Leap over legacy systems with a single bound
That’s particularly important to younger viewers who are used to having a wide and increasing variety of video choice on their PCs. We know a handful of people who have just dropped their cable TV service and now rely on Hulu.com, AOL TV, YouTube, Atom, and the host of other video sources available on broadband Internet. Cable companies and other service providers not only want to attract new customers with enhanced services, they want to hold on to their existing ones, Jarrett says.
The view from the roof of the Tech Square Research Building in Atlanta is impressive, but Clearleap has an equally sharp view of broadband and television convergence.
“As our customers (service providers and others) migrate to next generation boxes and IP connected TVs, our platform allows them to connect directly to those,” Jarrett adds.
He says Clearleap’s “special sauce as a company” is its ability to leap over legacy systems with a single bound. Well, it can peacefully co-exist with them, anyway. “That’s hard to do and the ability to just plug into them is rare,” but Clearleap can do it, he says.
“That means we can offer our services to the widest range of customers. You just plug it in and it works. We have customers who will tell you, we came in one day and the next day they had a large variety of new content for their consumers. That’s unheard of in this industry.”
Founded by industry veterans
Clearleap was co-founded by Jarratt and John Vecchio, veterans of venture funded N2Broadband, a video pioneer acquired by Tandberg for $120 Million in 2005. Both held executive positions at Tandberg Television (an Ericsson company). Jarratt held senior positions at Cox Enterprises and Vecchio at Scientific Atlanta (now a part of Cisco).
Previously, Braxton worked at Cox as director of Product Strategy for the cable division and GM in the interactive media division, where he launched the first broadband internet content service in partnership with @Home. Braxton’s first tech startup experience was as the head of commercial services with Primenet, an internet startup purchased by GlobalCenter.
A graph showing how the Clearleap technology works.
With Turner Broadcasting, Scientific Atlanta, and other video technology companies thriving in Atlanta, the city is becoming known as a hub for the industry.
Clearleap’s founders know the industry well, and Jarrett admits, with video convergence rushing upon us, Clearleap is in the catbird seat.
The company raised a $9 million first round led by Trinity Ventures of Menlo Park, CA, and Noro-Mosely Partners of Atlanta. “We were Trinity’s first Atlanta investment,” Jarrett says as we survey the city spread before us from the roof overlooking downtown. “They don’t normally invest in young companies outside their geographic area.”
The company took $3 million in debt funding from Silicon Valley Bank in October 2008.
“The Clearleap team has great respect in its industry and is poised to make a significant impact on the future of television,” said Dale Kirkland of Silicon Valley Bank’s Atlanta office at the time of the funding.
Jarrett says the company’s goal with its first round funding was to land major customers and develop recurring revenue and it met both goals. “We have about half the top ten cable and IPTV operators as clients,” he notes. Those include Comcast and CBS.
“We’ll be raising a B round sometime in the middle of this year to drive growth,” he says.
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