[Funding alert] Video customer experience platform Hippo Video raises $4.5M in Series A round

US headquartered Hippo Video, a cloud-based video CX platform, which also has an office in Chennai, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Alpha Wave Incubation (AWI), a $300 million venture fund, managed by Falcon Edge Capital, a 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. The latest round of funds will be used to propel the company to expand its GTM teams as well as ramp up the engineering team.

Karthi Mariappan, CEO and Founder of Hippo Video, 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 its REAL^TM platform. Through personalised videos, sales teams can achieve productivity increases of up to 3x.”

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Started by ex-Zoho executives, Hippo Video aims to be a one-stop solution for your video needs

Founded in 2016 by ex-Zoho team, Hippo Video offers solutions across creation, delivery, and measurement of metrics for personalised videos. The company 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 and analytics, and enterprise grade security.

The firm said it has shown robust ROI metrics for customers – email response rates increased by 3x, qualified lead generation increased by 66 percent, sales velocity increased by 2x.

Navroz D Udwadia, Co-founder and Partner at Falcon Edge Capital, said:

“We are 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,” he added.

As part of this investment from AWI, Hippo Video will expand its presence to Abu Dhabi and use it as a strong global base for international expansion while also targeting the GCC, MENA, and other global markets. It will also build a team of data scientists, product managers, and engineers located in Abu Dhabi.

“Post Covid, there is a massive uptick in video as a default mode of communication, and all parties engaging on video have got acclimatised to it. We believe that Hippo Video, with its technology of making personalised 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,” said Shailesh Ghorpade, Managing Partner and CIO at Exfinity Venture Partners. 

The platform claims it has demonstrated 4x+ year-on-year revenue growth, over 100 percent net dollar retention, and a 4x LTV/CAC already, showing signs of product market fit. Armed with product led growth, the company aims to put its video CX platform in the hands of every business right from SMBs to enterprises.