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When Jerome Rota (aka "Gej") made the codec available on his personal website after he had reverseengineered the Microsoft MPEG-4 V3 codec, it became popular because it enabled reasonable quality video transmission over the internet. (See DivX). In early 2000, Jordan Greenhall , a former Mp3.com executive, put forward the idea of using the technology to found a company. With co-founders Joe Bezdek , Darrius Thompson and Tay Nguyen , DivXNetworks, Inc. was created. After coming under scrutiny for their original "DivX ;-)" codec, which was not a clean room design codec, DivXNetworks created a new version of the codec and several members of the original "Project Mayo" team left the DivX team, as they preferred to work on an open source codec rather than a commercialised one.
Project Mayo now develop OpenDivX, and several ex-members went on to help create the XviD codec.
In September 2000, Zone Ventures of Los Angeles, California, as well as Tim Draper and serveral other investors from the Draper Fisher Jurvetson family of funds provided the initial round of investment. On June 4 2002, DivXNetworks recieved an additional $6 million. Zone Ventures was again one of the largest investors, deriving funds from the WI Harper group. Draper Atlantic and the Wasatach Venture Fund also invested, and Tim Draper made another personal investment. This put DivXNetworks' total equity finiancing at over $11.5 million.
DivXNetworks received awards in both the AlwaysOn "100 Top Innovators 2004", and the "Red Herring 100 Top Private Companies". Jordan Greenhall was also featured in the BridgeGate "20 Awards 2002" list.
In addition to the DivX codec itself, DivXNetworks licenses its codec for portable DivX players and DivX compatible DVD players.