If you use Twitter with any regularity, you must have heard of Meerkat before this. If not, is a new livestreaming app that syncs up with Twitter to let you live stream and share video in real time. The app quickly became a favorite of Product Hunt users several weeks ago after it was posted to the startup and app discovery website. It was a hit at SXSW as well. The app now has well over 3,00,000 users, just three weeks after its launch. Presidential candidates and celebrities are using it. Meerkat has been called the new technology that will affect the 2016 US presidential election.
To be fair, rival apps that do the same exist—notably Periscope, which was recently acquired by Twitter—but Meerkat is the one that’s generating all the buzz right now. As you’d expect, Meerkat initially depended on Twitter for its social graph, a fact that Twitter used to its advantage by severely limiting its access the day it acquired Periscope. Despite that, Meerkat says it’s grown by 30% in the last two weeks. Meerkat also recently started introducing new features to allow it to operate independently of Twitter.
Created by Ben Rubin, a 27-year-old former architecture student from Israel, who now serves at the firm’s CEO, Meerkat has little to fear from Twitter’s move, and angel investors are lining up in droves to fund this hot property. Three days into SXSW’s Interactive portion, Meerkat was already the most-discussed app of the conference — a distinction previously held by Foursquare and location-based app Highlight. But unlike those two, the company entered SXSW already riding a wave of goodwill generated by supporters, including skateboard legend Tony Hawk, actor and startup investor Ashton Kutcher, and Index Ventures partner Saul Klein.
Air, the company behind Meerkat, has so far raised $4.2 million in funding for its efforts in the live-streaming space; its backers include DreamIt Ventures and Entree capital. The startup is now reportedly in talks for a new round of funding on the heels of its success.
Check out Meerkat on the iOS App Store.
