SUMMARY
The seed funding round was led by SRI Capital and Touchstone Equities
Hyderabad Angels was the other major investor
The company plans to use the newly raised funds for further expansion in North America
Artificial Intelligence-based video product solutions company VideoKen has raised close to $1 Mn (INR 6.8 Cr) in its second round of seed funding led by SRI Capital and Touchstone Equities, with Hyderabad Angels being the other major investor.
Videoken is headquartered at Princeton and have a subsidiary in India at Bengaluru. The company plans to use the newly raised funds for further expansion in the North America region, which it believes has a huge market potential for their video indexing technology.
Founded in 2017 by Manish Gupta, who was the former Vice President of Xerox, and Ashish Vikram, the former VP of Engineering at Yahoo and Flipkart, VideoKen is exploring video indexing space and using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to summarise videos and create automated index and glossary for videos.
“Enterprises are producing and consuming videos in a big way for a variety of stakeholders – customers, partners and employees. The consumability of these videos remains a huge challenge, the experience needs a complete transformation.”, says Manish Gupta, co-founder and CEO of VideoKen.
VideoKen currently has two products:
- one aimed at the marketing and communication functions of enterprises
- another is aimed at the learning vertical
VideoKen already boasts of several large clients such as Walmart Labs, Robert Bosch, TCS, ACM and ADBI, among others. VideoKen enables videos with Table of Contents, Phrase Cloud, In-video search, In-video CTA and bookmarks, Video SEO, and Social Sharing.
The company with its R&D lab in Bengaluru has a small but strong engineering team working across artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision to make videos that much more consumable.
Sashi Reddi, Managing Partner, SRI Capital, said, “Videos account for roughly 75% of the internet traffic and their usage by enterprises continues to increase. We will soon see a paradigm shift in how videos are consumed and I’m glad to see VideoKen at the forefront of this change. I am confident that this investment will enable the VideoKen team to establish a leadership position in this emerging space.”
Video And The Scope Of AI
According to a recent FICCI–EY report, 500 Mn Indians will watch videos by 2020. Digital media product consumption in this segment is currently pegged at $1.2 Bn (INR 8,000 Cr) and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.5% to reach $3.9 Bn (INR 25,500 Cr) by 2020 in India.
Add to this the capabilities of Artificial intelligence which has become the new level of growth and innovation to daily tech and services.
Government think-tank Niti Ayog is also planning to adopt artificial intelligence in the sectors of healthcare, agriculture, education, infrastructure, and transportation. With emerging startups in the AI sector, the global AI sector is poised to grow to $16.06 Bn by 2022.
In the video indexing space, VideoKen competes with the likes of Wistia, Vilynx and more. However, in India, the segment remains largely untapped.
