MIT Enterprise Forum Keynote by Allaire, the $60 Million Man

I rarely get so excited when a non-client raises a round -- even a really big round -- but I found myself grinning broadly at today's news that Brightcove just raised an eye-popping $59.6 million round, led by AllianceBernstein LP, Brookside Capital LLC and Maverick Capital Ltd. Mass High Tech calls this "...one of the largest private funding rounds for a local networking company in recent memory."

Brightcove's chairman and CEO is Jeremy Allaire, and you can read his blog post about the funding here.

Allaire just happens to be the opening keynote of the MIT Enterprise Forum Conference: Brave New Web: Connect. Contribute. Collaborate. And CHEN PR just happens to be sponsoring the event and serving on the conference committee. Kudos to the folks on the committee who reached out to Allaire. And kudos to Allaire and the many other great speakers in the lineup for demonstrating that cool tech stuff is happening in New England.

When Allaire founded Brightcove in 2004, Internet TV did not look like the sure bet it does now, so Brightcove deserves tons of credit for pioneering this market. In the intervening years, the desirability of Web-based video content has been proven by YouTube and Google Video.

This round, pegged for international expansion, attests to the fact that Internet TV looks like a no brainer now. And Brightcove is lining up major media partners, like Time Life, Dow Jones, AOL and Hearst. (The latter are both investors as well.)

And on the chic scale, it's tough to beat having a candidate (Barack Obama) announcing his presidential bid using Brightcove technology.

Join us on February 7th. I'm sure that Jeremy will have a killer presentation.