Video Conferencing Hardware Reviews

It’s only been four months since Highfive‘s video conferencing units have been available, but already the company is seeing incredible traction among early customers. So much so that the startup has raised an additional $32 million in Series B funding to ramp up its sales machine and get its hardware in even more conference rooms around the world.

Highfive has built a video conferencing solution that includes an $800 piece of hardware that can easily be connected to any TV in a conference room and capture video and audio thanks to a 1080p video camera, a high-fidelity mic array, and a wireless chip. That wireless chip is important, because the other part of its system is a cloud-based conferencing solution that can be streamed through desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Co-founder Shan Sinha dreams of a day in which every conference room in the world is wired and ready to do video conferencing. And his hope is that each of those rooms will have a Highfive video conferencing unit equipped to do so.

Early demand has given Highfive reason to be optimistic. In the first 90 days, more than 500 companies have signed up and adopted its system. That includes companies like Patagonia, Slack, and Warby Parker. Some of them, like Zenefits, are putting a unit in every conference room, as a way to connect with employees, partners, and customers.

And unlike some other video conferencing systems, Highfive’s hardware isn’t just being installed and then going unused. Sinha told me that of people registered to use the product, 80 percent use Highfive every week. Altogether, that’s putting Highfive on pace to stream more than a million minutes of video per week within its first six months, making it one of the fastest-growing video startups ever.

Highfive has brought on an additional $32 million in Series B funding, which was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and includes participation from existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, SV Angel, Box’s Aaron Levie, Dropbox’s Drew Houston (at least they can agree on something), Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and YouTube’s Shishir Mehrotra. Altogether the company has raised more than $45 million since being founded in 2012.

With that funding, Highfive plans to double its workforce, from about 50 employees to 100 by the end of the year. While a lot of that will go into engineering, Highfive will be investing heavily in building out its sales and marketing team. After all, there are some 25 million conference rooms in the world that aren’t currently hooked up to do video conferencing. And those Highfive units aren’t gonna all sell themselves, even if to date the company has been receiving mostly inbound interest.