Alon Maor

Alon Maor on

Building Qwilt Into a Great Company

Today, we are announcing our Series-C financing. Meaningful milestones and announcements provide a great opportunity to stop for a moment and reflect – The completion of this latest round of financing is both a testimony to our remarkable growth trajectory and a milestone in Qwilt’s amazing journey over the last 3 years. As a team, we are relentless, determined and optimistic. Our passion and success so far in this journey speak volumes about our character and outlook for the future.

Online Video is clearly becoming one of the hardest challenges that Network Operators will be facing in the next decade. We are engaged with more than 150 customers worldwide today – some of them are experiencing 90% growth of video year over year which translates to 60% growth of their overall internet traffic. There are two implications here: cost and quality of experience. Both metrics will suffer with today’s internet architecture and that’s already clear to the whole industry. Luckily enough, with video, the nature of the problem also dictates the nature of the solution: Qwilt is making internet video run faster at a fraction of the cost – that’s it. Video caching will become an integral part of the new internet architecture. We expect video to be served in every neighborhood from a nearby Video Fabric Controller. This is a huge market opportunity that we will capture. The beauty here is that this vision and opportunity translates to a win-win situation for all parties involved: End Users, Network Operators, Content Delivery Networks & Online Video Providers. Consequently, our vision and execution are the main reason so many Network Operators are trialing and buying our products.

We have been shipping the QB-Series for a little over a year now and it has been a phenomenal year. We are continuously increasing our customer base and have been doubling our revenue every quarter. Our growth and product adoption is on pace with some of the fastest growing networking companies in the tech history. More importantly, our customer satisfaction is superb. All our customers, without exception, are praising the product and the team that is partnering with them.

From a pure technology point of view, the last year allowed us to validate our differentiation in multiple aspects: we offer 3 times greater video caching results for Netflix than any other competitor, at a footprint that is 5 times smaller and half of the price. More than that, the principal design of the QB-Series is compared by many of our customers to the disruptive impact of the iPhone in the cellphone industry – the QB-series is a fundamentally different approach to usability and user experience for a networking product. The combination of our technology differentiation and our unique product offering creates a competitive advantage that is substantial today and critical for our long term evolution as a company.

I have a great sense of pride and responsibility for the great team that we have built. We’ve been around for some time and we’ve all heard the various mantras ‘it’s all about the team’, ’10x engineers’, etc. With Qwilt, I realized that each of these mantras is far more profound and true than I previously perceived. Our team makes all the difference, in every aspect. We wouldn’t have been standing here today without the great team we have and I’d like to take this opportunity to be thankful for that.

The recent investment by Bob Goodman and the team at Bessemer validates what we’ve accomplished so far and even more importantly, allows us to be even bolder and move more quickly to capture the opportunity.

Great companies have three very clear attributes: great team, huge market and exceptional products. I woke up this morning with a clear realization that we have a chance to further foster all those attributes and build Qwilt into a great company. We are fortunate, we cherish it and we will keep working hard in order to make our dreams come true.

Stay Tuned!