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Kilar founded Vessel late last year and has been operating in “stealth” mode ever since.
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Jason Kilar, rated in the internet media industry as one of its rising stars has announced the successful conscription of $75 million for what was known for not so long ago as “The Fremont Project, ” and, since the funding, has been given its official title “Vessel.”
Kilar and his co-founder and chief technology officer Richard Tom are preserving the rights to keep tight lipped on what Vessel will actually do when they begin operation, other than to say that it will be focused on providing a new form of original video content. According to Kilar, CEO of Vessel further details of the company’s activities and products will be made public towards the end of the year.
What is for sure that is that Jason Kilar comes with a very impressive track record having played a major part in the founding as well as acting as CEO at Hulu, a joint venture between Disney, NBC Universal and 21st Century News from July 2007 before leaving in March 2013 to begin his work on “The Fremont Project, ”
Among the investors in Vessel are Kilar’s former boss Jeff Bezos, of Amazon, through his private investment fund Bezos Expeditions as well as venture capitalists Benchmark and Greylock Partners.
Announcing the investment, Kilar stated that to have such an amazing group put their faith in us is both energizing and humbling.
“We’ve been busy building a service whose mission is to delight consumers and content creators alike and although we still have more work to do at Vessel, we want to share this brief update and reach out to the creator community.” Kilar went on to reveal
With the funding, a representative of Benchmark, Bill Gurley as well as one from Greylock, will be joining Kilar and Tom on the company’s board.
Although he was still reluctant to give out too many numbers, Kilar did go on to explain that the new company’s development team , with many years of strong experience building and innovating, garnered with companies such as Hulu, Netflix and Amazon, with the comment the long-awaited being that the team, are unusually passionate about the intersection of media and technology as well as a desire to improve media, in particular the development of next-generation video,
Jason Kilar graduated with an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he studied Business Administration and Journalism & Mass Communication.
After graduation Kilar began his professional career working with The Walt Disney Company, in the Design & Development Department, before leaving to join Amazon.com where he held a number of management roles, including Vice President and General Manager with responsibility for Amazon’s North American media businesses, including the company’s books, music, video, and DVD marketing divisions categories.
Following his success in that division Jason was appointed to the role of Senior Vice President in charge of Worldwide Application Software development, where he led a team comprising hundreds of world-class technologists, reporting directly to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.
