Exclusive: AI-powered video-tech startup VideoKen tops up seed funding round

New Jersey- and Bengaluru-based VideoKen Inc., which runs an eponymous artificial intelligence-powered video-tech platform, has raised $930,000 (Rs 6.83 crore at the current exchange rates) from SRI Capital and Touchstone Equities, a top company official told TechCircle.

Hyderabad Angels also participated in the round. Existing investor LG Chandrasekhar of Sutures India and a number of other angel investors including Flipkart and former Yahoo executives have also put in money, the person mentioned above said.

This is the second round of seed funding that the startup has raised. It will use the fresh capital to expand its operations in North America.

In its first round of seed funding, VideoKen had raised $1 million from a clutch of angel investors, including current and former Flipkart executives such as its chief technology officer Ravi Garikipati, former product head Surojit Chatterjee and former engineering head Ashish Agrawal. Sutures’ Chandrasekhar, SRI Capital’s US-based partner Sashi Reddi and some unnamed high-net-worth individuals from the US and Hong Kong had also put in money.

VideoKen

Founded in 2017 by Manish Gupta (chief executive officer), a former vice-president at Xerox, and Ashish Vikram (chief technology officer), Flipkart’s former vice president of engineering (ad platform and big data), VideoKen currently has two products—one aimed at the marketing and communication functions of enterprises and the other is tailored for the learning vertical.

The platform uses AI and machine learning to summarise videos into digital textbooks which include automated indexes and glossaries for videos.

As a video-based social learning solution, it helps educators and learners search, curate, personalise and share video clips. It offers educational videos that come with several features, such as finding sections that are of interest, clipping interesting parts of a video, inserting notes and sharing them with friends, among others. Users can then store their videos on a cloud platform offered by the company.

VideoKen aggregates all publicly-available educational videos on YouTube (including MIT Open Courseware, NPTEL, TED, Udacity, Khan Academy and many others) as well as videos that are owned privately.

"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 and the experience needs a complete transformation," Gupta said.

Its clientele includes Walmart Labs, Robert Bosch, TCS, ACM and ADBI, among others.

Headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey, VideoKen has a research and development lab in Bengaluru.

"Videos account for roughly 75% of internet traffic and their usage by enterprises continue 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," Sashi Reddi, managing partner, at SRI Capital said.