Vessel, a stealthy startup led by former Hulu execs Jason Kilar and Richard Tom, has raised a new round of cash from Benchmark, Greylock and Bezos Expeditions, the venture capital arm of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos.
The company had previously operated under the code name The Fremont Project, a name that paid homage to Seattle’s quirky neighborhood that’s home to Tableau, Impinj, Adobe, GeekWire and Tom’s favorite sandwich shop, Paseo.
Grabbing cash from Bezos should not have been that much trouble for Kilar, who prior to serving as CEO of Hulu worked as a senior vice president at Amazon.com.
Kilar and Tom still aren’t saying much about what Vessel is creating. The startup is based in San Francisco.
“Rich and I have been fortunate to build and innovate alongside each other these past 5+ years and our plan is to do more of that on the road ahead,” wrote Kilar in a blog post last year.
Here’s the full blog post that Kilar and Tom just posted:
We’ve been busy building a service whose mission is to delight consumers and content creators alike. Though we still have more work to do at Vessel, we want to share this brief update and reach out to the creator community.
If you are a content creator, particularly a video content creator, we should talk!
We have assembled a unique and talented team, with strong experience building and innovating at places like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon. As a team, we are unusually passionate about the intersection of media and technology; we see an opportunity to improve media, particularly next generation video.
Our investors, led by Benchmark, Greylock Partners, and Bezos Expeditions (the personal investment company of Jeff Bezos), are world class and gifted builders. To have such an amazing group put their faith in us is energizing and humbling.
We’ll have much more to share prior to the end of the year. But for now, it’s back to work for us!
