Standards help researchers bring their innovation to the market and give credibility over the development of an innovative technology, and start-ups and spin-offs to scale up their business.
The CEN and CENELEC Innovation Plan aims at addressing venture capital investors by highlighting the benefit of standards. For venture capitalists that invest in risky innovative business, it is crucial to assess the scalability potential of the businesses they are funding. From their perspective, seeing innovative technologies that are developed with the support of standards can reduce the risk for the companies in which they invest.
Bitmovin is a successful example of a start-up that managed to scale-up thanks to standardization. The company was started as a spin-off from research at the University of Klagenfurt, in Austria. Bitmovin’s founders were involved very early in the standardization process of a new video technology and they co-created the MPEG-DASH standard, adopted as ISO/IEC 23009-1. They established a network within research and industry which allowed to disseminate their findings and results from various projects. In the process of creating this new standard, they realised that a business opportunity had emerged.
Bitmovin is today an established company with offices in Austria, London, New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. The company went through different funding rounds, attracting first angel investors and then venture capitalists. In 2018, Bitmovin raised $30 million in a Series B funding round - the second round of business funding led by the growth-stage technology fund Highland Europe. Fergal Mullen, partner at Highland Europe, expressed his belief that research and standardization are drivers to develop innovative technology spin-offs that have the potential to become successful startups.
Livia MIAN
lmian@cencenelec.eu
