AnyDesk raises €6.5 million to reinvent the remote desktop experience for today’s workforce

AnyDesk announced today it has raised a €6.5 million Series A round. Lead investor in the round is the EQT Ventures fund (“EQT Ventures”), with participation from angel investors, including Chris Hitchen, and existing investor Andreas Burike. The funding will be used to continue product innovation and grow the technical and commercial teams. AnyDesk was discovered by AI platform Motherbrain. The platform was developed by leading investment firm EQT and is used by EQT Ventures to discover the most promising companies and guide its investment decisions.

Today, people need to work with their teams and content just as quickly and fluidly when working remotely as they do when in the office. However, anyone who has used legacy remote desktop offerings knows how complicated, tedious and slow they can be. AnyDesk’s founders – Philipp Weiser, Olaf Liebe and Andreas Mähler – recognised this and re-engineered the remote desktop so that anyone, anywhere can get their work done without being distracted by the technology they are using.

The team has created a proprietary video codec (DeskRT) for graphical user interfaces, which transmits 60 frames per second with low latency. As a result, users experience high quality video and sound, and image transmission that is so fast and fluid that users often forget they are using a different computer. It has also been optimised for low-bandwidth scenarios. All of AnyDesk’s features have been packed into a tiny 1.9MB file, which transforms any desktop into your desktop in seconds.

AnyDesk has already secured more than 7,000 business customers and has been downloaded by more than 50 million users worldwide.

“The remote desktop experience people are used to can be frustrating – it was designed and optimised for technology available more than a decade ago,” said Philipp Weiser, founder and CEO at AnyDesk. “It takes time to get started and, when you’re finally set up, you may only be able to give a short presentation or help a colleague for 10 minutes while they set up a printer, for example, before you experience issues. You can’t work for hours at a time from any location, on any device, and there’s no point trying to edit video or CAD files – the performance and image quality aren’t good enough. At AnyDesk, we approached the remote desktop from a software-focused angle, providing people with the experience they’ve come to expect when consuming content. When you view a website or video on your devices, chances are you don’t think about the web browser or media player working in the background. You’re focused on the content. AnyDesk works in the same way, seamlessly running behind-the-scenes so you can be productive, creative and get on with your work. This investment and support from EQT Ventures will enable us to continue to innovate on the product and infrastructure, hire fantastic team members and ensure best-in-class service for our customers.”

“We were blown away by the impressive traction and growth that AnyDesk is showing,” said Axel Bard Bringéus, International Expansion Partner and investment advisor at EQT Ventures. “The team has tremendous talent and has built fantastic proprietary technology that supports today’s multi-device, always on workforce.The EQT Ventures team is looking forward to supportingAnyDesk on the next phase of its journey.”