Video As A Service Startup Hippo Video Raises Funding From Kae Capital

Online video-as-a-service (VaaS) platform Hippo Video has raised an undisclosed amount of Pre Series A funding from Kae Capital. Headquartered in Chennai, Hippo Video helps create, edit, host and track videos.

As per the official statement, the newly-secured funding will be utilised to expand the startup’s present to Europe, apart from India and the US.

Commenting on the fundraise, Shubhankar Bhattacharya, Venture Partner at Kae Capital said,  “The online video market for small businesses and independent professionals is a rapidly growing space. Hippo Video’s founders, Karthi, Nilam and Srinivasan, are proven product leaders when it comes to building and scaling software products for a global customer base.”

“Hippo Video’s value proposition as an all-in, easy-to-use, and highly affordable solution appears to have resonated with its target audience and we see signs of product-market fit being established. As early seed investors, we look forward to working with the team to help them further expand the business globally and become a true category leader,” Bhattacharya added.

Hippo Video: A One-Stop Platform For All Video Needs

Founded in 2016 by former Zoho employees Karthi Mariappan, Nilam Chand Jain and Srinivasan S, Hippo Video is a platform that takes care of the entire life cycle of video, from creating, editing, hosting, sharing to tracking.

Hippo Video’s USPs include online video creation, editing and contextual integration with Freshdesk and Zendesk for support and Google Classroom, Google Slides, Google Docs and D2L for education.

The startup officially launched operations in July 2017 and has so far lined up a customer base of 30,000 users globally, with the bulk of the users based in the US. Over the last six months, Hippo Video users have created more than 150K videos.

The School District of Ashland, Goulet Pens and Quick Pivot are some of the startup’s prominent clientele.

Speaking about the platform’s offerings, co-founder Karthi Mariappan stated, “With Hippo Video, creating video is not complex or expensive. From the moment we launched Hippo Video, our main focus has been to provide ‘Video as a Service’ that would enable anyone to create and edit videos. Majority of Hippo Video users include customer support staff, educators, freelancers, students, gamers, Youtubers and others. This shows that nearly every domain/vertical/segment has considerable pent-up demand for video. We focus on technology differentiated segmentation to gain strong market penetration.”

Some of the platform’s use cases include customer support, teaching and education. In customer support, user engagement is simplified by sending videos to communicate a technical explanation. Replacing email chains with video tickets (present contextually inside tickets and solutions page) allows customer to visualise how the problem has to be resolved.

In education, teaching and feedback become deeply engaging through the power of videos. Teachers record instructional and tutorial videos to explain a topic and give student feedback through videos. Students submit video assignments and practice presentation using videos which promotes interactive learning, mitigates cheating and brings out creativity in every student.

“We see an increased number of signups from the education sector, we believe that’s a good traction to keep up with,” Karthi added.

An Overview Of Kae Capital

Kae Capital is an early stage investment firm that primarily backs tech startups in a variety of domains, such as ecommerce, education, consumer Internet, healthcare, and mobile. Its first VC fund was launched in September 2012 and had a corpus of $25 Mn. The venture capital firm also provides Seed funding to up-and-coming startups.

At present, Kae makes around seven to eight Seed stage investments every year worth $700K-$800K. In September 2017, the firm closed its second VC fund at $53 Mn, a 32.5% increase from the estimated $40 Mn.

According to sources, around 40% of the fundraise was contributed by international investors and institutional backers like Quilvest, Velos Partners, Axis Capital and Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI).

The second VC fund was reportedly created to make larger investments to the tune of $5 Mn in Series A and Series B stage startups.

Kae Capital’s portfolio companies include Bengaluru-based predictive healthcare startup Touchkin, online gaming startup Hypernova, Mumbai-based fintech startup LoanTap and edtech platform Learntron. Some other companies that the early stage investment firm has backed in the past are B2B marketplace We Organise The Unorganised (WOTU), real estate management startup Azuro, and Healthkart.

Video creation is on the rise and is expected to skyrocket in 2018. As a report by Cisco, by 2021, 80% of the world’s Internet traffic will be video. According to a report by KPMG, India is currently home to more than 110 Mn digital video viewers.

By offering services across the video lifecycle, Kae Capital backed Hippo Video is eyeing to capture the relatively untapped video-as-a-service market that is emerging in India, Europe and the US.

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