Video SaaS Platform Hippo Video Raises $4.5 Mn In Series A Funding

Hippo Video, a video-as-a-service (VaaS) platform for enterprises, has raised $4.5 Mn in a Series A funding round led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI), a $300 Mn venture fund, and Exfinity Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in technology product companies in the B2B space. The company says that the funds would be used to build its go-to-market (GTM) teams and ramp up the engineering team. 

“With the increasing role of video in communication and social media, Hippo Video looks to capitalise on video as a key decision influencer and trust driver. Hippo Video drives sales, marketing, and overall customer experience through our REALTM platform. Through personalised videos created by Hippo Video, sales teams can achieve productivity increases of up to 3x,” said CEO and founder of Hippo Video, Karthi Mariappan.

Hippo Video claims it’s video personalisation and distribution platform helps companies achieve their marketing and sales goals through seamless video workflows. The company says it offers technological innovations such as rich online pro-editing, on the fly in-video personalisation at scale, video landing pages, smart webcam, and screen recorder, extensive reporting & analytics, and enterprise-grade security. Hippo Video claims to have robust ROI (return on investment) metrics for customers – email response rates increased by 3x, qualified lead generation increased by 66%, sales velocity increased by 2x.

“Hippo Video has and continues to demonstrate outstanding strong organic traction, customer retention, and like-for-like ACV growth. Most critically, customer feedback on the Hippo Video suite of products is tremendous” said Navroz D Udwadia, cofounder and partner at Falcon Edge Capital, a leading global asset manager, which manages the AWI venture fund. 

The investment from AWI will see Hippo Video expand its footprint to Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which it will use as a base for its continued bid for global expansion, more so in the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), MENA (Middle East and North Africa) and other markets. For this purpose, the company will look to build a team of data scientists, product managers and engineers in Abu Dhabi. 

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. 

Since officially launching operations in 2017, Hippo Video claims to have amassed more than 1 Mn users, before launching the latest video-driven customer experience platform. The company says it services more than 1,000 business clients globally, including Panasonic, Freshworks, Chargebee, Tailwinds Transportation, Essilor and Clarify Med, among others. 

Last year, Hippo Video was one of the startups selected in the first cohort of Sequoia Capital India’s startup accelerator and incubation programme for early-stage startups in India and Southeast Asia, Surge. As part of the accelerator programme, Surge would pick up 10–20 early-stage startups twice a year and invest $1.5 Mn (INR 10.6 Cr) in each of them at the start or very early stage of the programme.

In 2018, the company raised an undisclosed amount in Pre-Series A funding from Kae Capital, a sector-agnostic fund.