Altia Systems raises fresh funding from Naya Ventures, has raised $6.7M to date

Altia Systems Inc. a video and web collaboration solution provider, has raised fresh funding from Naya Ventures, an early-stage venture fund. As part of the investment, Dayakar Puskoor, managing director, Naya Ventures, has joined the board of directors of the company. The company has also disclosed that it has raised $6.7 million to date.

Other investors in the company include Rey Banatao, founder and CEO, Entropy Resins, a clean tech company; Dado Banatao, founder and managing partner, Tallwood Venture Capital; and Lucio Lanza, founder and MD, Lanza TechVentures.

"We are happy to have Naya Ventures as part of our team. Both Naya's expertise in early stage mobile and cloud-based companies and Puskoor's track record in building successful enterprise and mobile solution companies will be assets as we rapidly scale our company," said Aurangzeb Khan, president and CEO of Altia Systems.

California-based Altia Systems was founded by Khan, Atif Sarwari (CTO) and Larz Herlitz (CMO). The company's flagship product PanaCast is an immersive video collaboration solution with a full 200 degree field of view, which allows remote participants to see the full human panoramic perspective with individual control, just as if they were there. According to the company, the solution runs on billions of PCs, tablets and smart phones worldwide, and has exceptionally low bandwidth requirements.

Additionally, it augments popular web collaboration tools such as Cisco's WebEx, Microsoft Lync and Citrix's GoToMeeting by adding panoramic-HD video to the collaboration suite. PanaCast can be easily installed in all conference/collaboration rooms in an enterprise at a fraction of the cost of traditional video conferencing equipment. The company claims to have already bagged over 150 enterprise customers since its launch in April this year.

In his role, Puskoor, former Microsoft executive and founder of companies like JP Mobile (acquired by Good Technology/Motorola) and M2 Junction (acquired by SinglePoint), will provide strategic counsel to the company. "It's exciting to join Altia Systems at this inflection point as the PanaCast solution is scaling into large enterprises. This technology is as disruptive to business collaboration as the iPhone was to the mobile market," said Puskoor.

Founded in 2011, Naya Ventures is a $50-million early stage investment firm which focuses on India and US-focused companies operating in the mobile and cloud space. It invests anywhere between $250,000 and $3 million in startups. It has already invested in BoxFish, GlobalOutlook, Glympse, Zoomingo, etc. Headquartered in Dallas, the company has its India office in Hyderabad. It was founded by Puskoor, executive chairman at Motivity Labs and at GlobalOutlook; Prabhakar Reddy, an active angel investor and board director at GlobalOutlook and Motivity Labs; and Gowri Shankar, former president and CEO at SinglePoint.

In July this year, the firm, along with angel investment group TiE Angel Group Seattle or TAGS, had invested $2 million in Minetta Brook Inc., a Big Data intelligence startup. As part of the investment, Gowri Shankar, venture partner at Naya Ventures, had joined the board of Minetta.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)