Japan’s content distribution tech startup Pulit raises series A from Samsung, Line Ventures

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The Pulit team
Image credit: Pulit

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based Pulit, the Japanese startup developing distribution technologies for digital image and video content, has secured funding in a series A round from Samsung Venture Investment and an investment fund managed by Line Ventures. The funding sum has not been disclosed but it is estimated at several million of US dollars.

For Pulit, this follows their seed round back in August of 2016 (raising 50 million yen) and their pre-series A round back in June of 2017 (raising about 100 million yen). The company also disclosed at this time that investors participating in the previous pre-series A round were DK Gate (a joint venture company of Digital Garage and Kodansha) and Dentsu.

While Samsung Venture Investment and Line Ventures are corporate venture capital arms of the global electronics giant and the messaging giant respectively, possible strategic partnerships between Pulit and these companies are still unclear. The company uses the funds to strengthen hiring engineers (focused on content distribution network, digital rights management and content streaming technologies) as well as business developers aiming to launch an official roll-out.

Super Distribution System (SDS)
Image credit: Pulit

Pulit was founded in 2015 by K.W. Lee (CEO), a Tokyo Institute of Technology graduate who had been engaged in R&D at Samsung Electronics, Min-Soo Kim (CTO) who had been developing apps as a freelance programmer and Shohei Komatsu (Director) who had been involved in fund management or technical advisory work at Tokyo-based startup accelerator Slogan. The firm was born out from the first batch of seed acceleration program Supernova which is jointly managed by Draper Nexus, Slogan, Coent Venture Partners and Viling Venture Partners (however, their participation was undisclosed because they were still in stealth mode as of Demo Day).

In the Super Distribution System (SDS) scheme developed by Pulit, as content holders or creators upload videos to be distributed onto cloud, Robust Image Watermark is embedded on the cover image and direct access link (URL) is issued for each video. Clicking the direct access link, OS-native players are activated and then users are allowed to watch the videos on PC or smart devices. Also, DRM (digital rights management) control is available, so that users can save the videos on local environment or watch them again according to conditions set by content holders or creators.

Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy