Dropcam, the maker of a WiFi video camera with a cloud recording service, has announced a $30 million Series C investment round led by Institutional Venture Partners with participation from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing investors Menlo Ventures and Accel Partners. The company plans to use the funds to build out its engineering team and expand distribution of its cameras.
To date, the company has raised $47.8 million, including a $12 million Series B round and a $5.8 million Series A round. Since shipping its first units, in late 2009, Dropcam has seen its camera sales quintuple every year.
According to Dropcam CEO and co-founder Greg Duffy, the investment will be used to triple the company’s headcount. On the distribution front, Dropcam is keen to take its $149 Dropcam HD camera beyond Amazon to other retail outlets.
Duffy said in an interview that Dropcam hadn’t been actively pursuing fundraising, but it decided to take on additional money because IVP and KPCB are valuable investors to have and the round would help accelerate the startup’s growth.
Dropcam doesn’t have the most glamorous of origins: Duffy began work on the product to help his dad discover which neighbor was leaving dog poop in his yard. Now its combined model of hardware plus premium cloud services is looking pretty good right now.
Duffy noted that 39 percent of Dropcam HD buyers subscribe to the cloud storage service, which starts at $9.95 a month. Meanwhile, 60 percent of owners make use of the free Dropcam Live service.
The new investment will also help Dropcam improve its motion detection algorithms. It’s working with a massive data set, as it asserts that it now processes more uploaded video than YouTube. Duffy said the company will announce its first computer vision features later this year.
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