The funding is led by Alpha Wave Incubation and Exfinity Venture Partners
Bengaluru, NFPost: Hippo Video – a fast-growing company in the video-driven Customer Experience (CX) domain, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding.
The investment round was led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI), a $300m venture fund, managed by Falcon Edge Capital, a leading global alternative asset manager, and backed by ADQ, one of the largest regional holding companies based in Abu Dhabi, and Exfinity Venture Partners.
Existing investors Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, and KAE Capital also participated in this round. This latest round of funds will be used to propel the company to expand its GTM teams as well as ramp up the engineering team.
Hippo Video Founder and CEO Karthi Mariappan said 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 REAL platform. Through personalized videos created by Hippo Video, sales teams can achieve productivity increases of up to 3x,” said Hippo Video Founder and CEO Karthi Mariappan.
Personalised videos
Hippo Video offers complete solutions across creation, delivery, and measurement of metrics for personalised videos. Founded by an ex-Zoho team, Hippo Video also 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. It has shown robust ROI metrics for customers – email response rates increased by 3x, qualified lead generation increased by 66%, sales velocity increased by 2x.
Falcon Edge Capital Co-founder and Partner Navroz D. Udwadia said Falcon Edge Capital is excited to back Karthi and an outstanding team at Hippo Video, who bring decades of experience in building / scaling SaaS products globally via their domain expertise at Zoho.
“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 Falcon Edge Capital Co-founder and Partner Navroz D. Udwadia.
Expanded presence
As part of this investment from AWI, Hippo Video will expand its presence to Abu Dhabi and use the Emirate as a strong global base for international expansion while also targeting the GCC, MENA, and other global markets. Hippo Video will also build a world-class team of data scientists, product managers, and engineers located in Abu Dhabi.
Exfinity Venture Partners Managing Partner and CIO Shailesh Ghorpade Post Covid, there is a massive uptick in video as a default mode of communication, and all parties engaging on video have got acclimatized to it.
“We believe that Hippo Video, with its technology of making personalized videos at scale and importantly, at a cost that is not different from mail and other notifications, has immense potential to make sales and support processes effective, leading to superior conversion and engagement for its clients. This is imperative in the post Covid world, where ROI on marketing is a key metric for enterprises. Going forward, other use cases like internal / external communication by enterprises will propel further growth.” said Exfinity Venture Partners Managing Partner and CIO Shailesh Ghorpade.
Product review
Hippo Video has demonstrated 4x+ year-on-year revenue growth, 100%+ net dollar retention, and a 4x LTV/CAC already, showing strong signs of product market fit. Going by their product reviews in G2 crowd, where they have just become the leaders, sales reps actually refer to their colleagues to try the platform and become customers after tasting success with videos.
Armed with this brilliant product-led growth, Hippo Video aims to put its video CX platform in the hands of every business right from SMBs to enterprises.
KAE Capital Partner Gaurav Chaturvedi said it’s been a privilege to watch the Hippo Video team scale and ascend new heights.
“Their journey and commitment to excellence in the video technology landscape has given us the confidence to back them consistently,” said KAE Capital Partner Gaurav Chaturvedi
Hippo Video is a cloud-based video CX platform by Lyceum Technologies Inc, Newark, Delaware. Since its launch, Hippo Video has acquired over 1 Million users before launching the latest video CX platform. It has more than 1,000 business customers globally, including Panasonic, Freshworks, Chargebee, Tailwinds Transportation, Essilor, Clarify Med, etc. Visit: https://www.hippovideo.io for more details.
Support mechanism
Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI) is a $300m venture fund managed by Falcon Edge Capital, and backed by ADQ. AWI has a dedicated team across London, Bangalore, and Abu Dhabi.
The fund invests in early stage tech-enabled, disruptive start-ups in India and SouthEast Asia. In addition to providing outstanding founders with early-stage capital, AWI offers access to an unrivaled set of support mechanisms for business-building, while also helping companies expand globally and open up new markets in the GCC/MENA region and beyond.
ADQ is one of the region’s largest holding companies with a broad portfolio of major enterprises spanning key sectors of Abu Dhabi’s diversified economy.
Falcon Edge Capital is a diversified global alternative asset manager co-founded in 2012 by Rick Gerson, Navroz D. Udwadia, and Ryan Khoury. Falcon Edge manages approx. $4bn in assets across public and private markets. Falcon Edge has offices in New York, London and Bangalore. The firm offers a variety of investment products and strategies that cover a number of asset classes, themes, and geographies.
