[Funding alert] Toch raises $1M in pre-Series A round from SOSV, 9 Unicorns Fund

Video meta-tagging platform Toch said it has raised over $1 million in its latest round of funding, from investors including SOSV and its accelerator, Chinaccelerator, 9 Unicorns Fund, and Inflection Point Ventures.

The Mumbai-based company said it will use the funds to further deepen its tech infrastructure, and grow its team.

ALSO READ

[Techie Tuesday] This engineer went from healthcare and political psychology to mini ICUs for coronavirus patients

Toch, which was founded by Vinayak Srivastav, Saket Dandotia, and Alok Patil, is a video platform that 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.

Using Toch’s platform, OTT companies can identify the right opportunities to present ads based on crowd excitement levels in sporting areas, helping broadcasters increase monetization from ad sales.

“The amount of video content from broadcast media and live streamers is ballooning,” said William Bao Bean, Partner at SOSV and Managing Director at Chinaccelerator.

“We believe that Toch’s ability to automatically analyse, edit, curate, and publish video content in real-time without having to take the content out of the customers’ cloud removes the need for a hugely labour intensive process,” he added.

SOSV currently has $740 million assets under management, which are focused on seed, and early-stage investments.

“Having SOSV on board will help Toch to expand in the global market," Saket Dandotia, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Toch, said.

Toch is poised to benefit from the latest coronavirus pandemic given the rise in video-consumption globally, said Dr Apoorv Sharma, partner at 9 Unicorns Fund — India’s first accelerator VC. It provides acceleration support and seed funding to early-stage startups.

In April, the company said it had raised $400,000 from Inflection Point Ventures (IPV) in a pre-Series A funding round.