[Funding alert] Media-tech startup Toch raises over $400K in round led by Inflection Point Ventures

Mumbai-based Toch, a video meta-tagging platform, has raised over $400,000 from Inflection Point Ventures (IPV) in a pre-Series A funding round.

The company intends to use funds raised to develop its tech infrastructure, and add more people to its team.

“Toch was founded with a vision to revolutionise the digital media experience and become a leading media-tech company. Toch has successfully implemented enabling meta-tagging for live sporting events, live shows, library-based content for streaming platforms, and is venturing into broadcasting meta-tagging simultaneously,” said Vinayak Srivastav, Co-Founder and CEO of the company.

The startup - co-founded in 2016 by Vinayak, Saket Dandotia and Alok Patil – helps online video creators, media companies, advertisers and OTT platforms optimise their videos and meta-tags by using AI and deep learning.

The company also helps broadcasters monetise live events, provide auto subtitles for live events in different languages based on the viewer’s location, and enable automatic meta-tagging.

“Toch tries to resolve the decade-old problem of the media industry for inserting metadata in video, live sports and ad-placement in real time. They are one of the best in the industry as far as latency for object identification, meta-tagging, image tagging, live streaming and e-commerce is considered,” said Rakesh Mistry, an investor at IPV.

Over-the-top media services have been seeing a huge surge in demand for content from consumers who want to pick and choose what they watch. The market is expected to hit $6 billion by the end of 2021, especially with technologies like AI and machine learning starting to personalise entertainment in a way it hasn’t been before.

Companies like Toch, which help streaming service providers such as Netflix and Amazon Prime curate shows and movies based on each user’s preferences, are also gaining traction as a result.

(Edited by Aparajita Saxena)