After a few intensive months, we’re excited to announce we have raised €1.3M, in a seed round led by Armilar Venture Partners, and joined by Portugal Ventures and Ideias Glaciares. We don’t celebrate financing rounds as ultimate victories (those are excited customers!), but this round is a stepping stone towards fulfilling our mission to help mobile applications ensure every user gets an outstanding experience, whether they’re connected through a fast WiFi network or a slower 3G connection. This round will help us grow our team and place our first global-scale deployments with mobile apps focused on first-rate user experience, for every user, anytime, anywhere.
But why do we intensively devote ourselves to this quest? App responsiveness is paramount for good user experience: if the app takes more than 3 seconds to load the desired content, 72% of the users leave the app. That’s why companies with mobile apps make a tremendous effort to ensure that every user experiences a fast and responsive app. However, even if they build the “perfect” app, the end-user experience will always depend on factors like network coverage and network’s level of usage: app loading times are completely different on a fast WiFi connection at home, on a crowded 4G connection in the city center or on a 3G connection. As a result, metrics like conversion, user retention, and even revenue, are highly dependent on something app owners do not control: wireless networks. And the worst part is that, even with massive investments in infrastructure and cloud technology, wireless links are killing user experience everywhere.
We are here to prevent wireless link instability from destroying the efforts mobile apps invest to ensure perfect user experience.
We have developed an SDK that supports apps in delivering an outstanding user experience, regardless of user location, device, network or content nature. Our SDK achieves this goal by using Bolina, a ground-breaking communication protocol specially designed to cope with the inherent instability of wireless links. With Codavel SDK, mobile apps see loading times decreasing by 20% to 80%, while ensuring that app responsiveness is similar over every network connection. And all developers have to do is to drag-and-drop the SDK into the app.
At this exciting stage of Codavel’s life, we needed experienced partners like Armilar, Portugal Ventures and Ideias Glaciares to help us take our SDK from the current beta to the stage where it's the go-to technology to deliver the best mobile user experience. Also, we’re looking for developers right now, to embark on this mission to revolutionize network technology. If you happen to be such a crazy developer, do reach out!
Why did these investors decide to join our daunting task? Let me share with you their own words.
"Codavel has a perfect fit with our AVP TechTransfer Fund. The company emanates from the founders’ PhD research at Universidade do Porto and MIT, and holds significant IP rights to execute the company’s strategy. Most importantly, Codavel is led by a bright, mature and knowledgeable team. We are confident that Codavel has the potential to bring the mobile app experience to a new level, in particular as video, gaming and other data-demanding applications will become more and more relevant in the wireless arena.", said José Guerreiro de Sousa, partner at Armilar Venture Partners.
“It is with great satisfaction that Portugal Ventures contributes to this important step in Codavel's growth. Portugal Ventures has been supporting Codavel since its inception and it has been gratifying to see its evolution. We are confident that Codavel’s team will qualify the product to be a global reference for mobile content delivery.”, said Rui Ferreira, Executive Vice President at Portugal Ventures.
"We are delighted to be joining this round with Codavel. We see a great team tackling a big problem with breakthrough technology. That's a powerful combination." said Dominic Gualtieri, partner at Ideias Glaciares.
In the 15th century, the Portuguese revolutionized the way goods were transported worldwide. They gathered the best knowledge, mobilized a small country towards a vision and made the most effective use of the scarce resources available to disrupt and improve how the world was connected. We believe that one of the most valuable goods today, digital content, is ripe for a similar revolution. A revolution that can dramatically improve how end-users are connected in this digital age, worldwide.
