Babelgum Co-Founder Leaves For RawFlow

While everyone’s busy saying it’s the early days of Internet TV, things are already shaking out. Babelgum co-founder and CEO Erik Lumer has left the company and taken on the chief executive role at RawFlow, another P2P TV platform. Lumer had also previously held the CEO title at Babelgum, but he passed that torch to Valerio Zingarelli in July so he could focus on strategic product development. CEO changes aside, a co-founder leaving is not a good sign for the young company.

Zingarelli was previously with Vodafone (VOD) and Omnitel. Silvio Scaglia, who had been CEO at Omnitel when Zingarelli was there, co-founded Babelgum with Lumer. Scaglia funded the company with $13.2 million of his own money, and told BusinessWeek he plans to spend $130 million more over the next few years.

RawFlow, by comparison, is an older and smaller startup. Founded in 2003, the company came a bit early to the space, developing peer-to-peer streaming technology that is only now seeing viable applications with the nascent adoption of live streaming video over the Internet. RawFlow recently launched Selfcast, a personal Internet broadcasting tool, and is looking to redefine itself as “a disruptive-free web TV platform that lets anybody create and share a live broadcast everywhere in the world,” according to an emailed press release announcing Lumer’s appointment.

RawFlow has raised at least $4 million from investors including Balderton Capital, the European arm of Benchmark capital. Founding CEO Mikkel Dissing will now serve as company president.