Elemental Technologies, a pioneer in the encoding / video processing industry sold to Amazon for $500M, according to one source. Elemental raised $44M in venture capital, with the last round coming in at $14.5M back in December 2014. The founders and employees have been rewarded for nine years of hard work. For Amazon, this was an excellent acquisition, not only in terms of acquiring an awesome stack of encoding technology, but they also get their hands on a blue chip roster of media clients.
In order to get a better sense on the economics of the deal, lets compare them to Harmonic. When it comes to encoding, Harmonic is a gold standard and leader in the industry. They refer to themselves as “The World Leader in Digital Video Infrastructure Solutions” and its hard to argue otherwise. Harmonic has been in the business for 25 years, employs 1,000+, generated $433M in sales last year, and has a market cap of $493M. In addition, the Harmonic product line is more extensive, as they provide video playback / storage, file-based workflow solutions, and few others. In light of this newfound knowledge, Elemental definitely came out on top.