Earlier this year I met with Guillaume Cohen, CEO and founder of Veodia, one of the more interesting companies in the enterprise video sector. Today Veodia said it had raised $8.3m in Series A funding from:

Clearstone Venture Partners, the D. E. Shaw group, and an angel group led by iParadigms chairman Steven Berger. The new financing will be used to support product development and add more talent to the team.

Veodia just added a heavyweight from the enterprise IT space:

Etay Gafni, who comes from SAP and joins the company as VP Products. Mr. Gafni brings more than 13 years of experience in product development, user-experience, community development and global management. He was one of the founders of the SAP Developer Network and worked closely with the office of the CTO.

Veodia is interesting because of its focus on the IT enterprise space rather than on the consumer video space, where many companies have had to abandon some of their user generated video strategies.

Veodia operates its own infrastructure and it optimizes the load on the network to ensure a high quality video product. Veodia describes itself as "The Live TV Studio In Your Browser" and that's a very accurate description. Using nothing more than your computer and an inexpensive camcorder, it is really easy to create a video presentation on-the-fly. Veodia takes the video and converts it into the MPEG-4/h.264 format, which has quickly become the standard for video because of its small file size and high quality resolution.

The Veodia setup doesn't require any knowledge of video formats, video editing software, conversion into different formats, etc. These are often obstacles to users generating video presentations. Veodia handles all of that in the background and the result is a high quality video in a format that can be broadcast live or re-broadcast as part of an archive.

Veodia's focus on the enterprise space is smart because there is money in the enterprise and its no-fuss approach means that users can be productive instantly.

Here is a Silicon Valley Minute from Guillaume Cohen: