NEWARK, Del.—-Hippo Video, a leading interactive video platform to increase sales engagement, today announced an $8 million funding round led by Dallas Venture Capital (DVC) with participation from Alpha Wave Incubation, KAE Capital, and Exfinity Venture Partners to support the company’s rapid expansion across the U.S.
Operating in a challenging macro-environment, sales leaders across all industries are under immense pressure to increase productivity and efficiency and achieve revenue targets – in many cases with fewer resources. At the same time, video messaging has become an essential part of the sales technology stack for pipeline growth, as cited by Gartner. Yet, video personalization historically has been unscalable, due to the copious amount of time and resources required for sales teams to create them. Additionally, video generally fails to provide interaction to keep the viewer engaged.
Hippo Video’s generative AI engine, Humanize AI, allows for hundreds of hyper-personalized videos to be made in a single day, leading to an increase in meetings booked, higher engagement, and improved win rates. Hippo Video’s easy-to-use, comprehensive platform enables sales teams to significantly increase engagement with personalized video outreach, delivering a level of ROI that is unattainable with other solutions.
“Businesses realize that video is a more impactful medium to establish better relationships that turn prospects into customers – but they have been unable to capture its full potential in the sales process,” said Karthi Mariappan, co-founder and CEO of Hippo Video. “By humanizing conversations with hyper-personalized, interactive videos, and enabling sales teams to distribute custom videos at scale, Hippo Video helps sales teams increase the pipeline and engagement which translates into higher win rates and revenue. This new capital will help us reach more companies in need of automated video technology to help them stand out among their prospects.”
Using Hippo Video’s patent-pending AI Editor removes the complexity associated with scalable video editing, seamlessly transcribing video audio for sales teams to edit faster and create professional-looking videos in just a few clicks. Communication with prospective customers is also made more impactful with the Hippo Video platform as it offers the inclusion of buttons, links to forms, polls, or call to actions inside the actual videos, providing an interactive viewing experience for prospects while collecting invaluable feedback and insights.
With a library of pre-built templates, the company’s Video Flows feature gives users the ability to record personal introductions and stitch them with pre-recorded videos for a tailor-fit output for every prospect. This eliminates having to tirelessly redo videos so users can craft customized videos in seconds.
“Atrium has sellers scattered all over the country and not always inside the hotel where face-to-face interaction is an option,” said Bryan King, vice president of sales and marketing with Atrium Hospitality. “In some cases, it’s Hippo Video that creates the breakthrough between our seller and the customer. Using Hippo Video, we created hundreds of videos that we can attribute to winning hundreds of thousands of dollars of business for our hotel.”
This funding will allow Hippo Video to expand its customer use cases across the U.S., adding to customers including a major European airline, Genesys, Seismic, HP, and Freshworks, who achieved a 3X increase in response rates and a 40% shorter sales cycle by utilizing Hippo Video. Hippo Video will also continue to innovate its product portfolio, focusing on enhancements to their varying product features.
“Hippo Video is a pioneer in leveraging generative AI and has built a multi-channel video marketing and sales engagement platform for enterprise users to create, share, and distribute engaging videos to improve outcomes for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success teams,” said Dayakar Puskoor, founder of Dallas Venture Capital. “We are thrilled to invest in Hippo Video that has demonstrated exponential growth in customers, users, and revenue.”
“As a cross-border venture capital firm, DVC has long been identifying and investing in early state B2B SaaS companies based in India and helping them scale globally by leveraging our DVC Advantage platform,” added Puskoor.
About Hippo Video
Hippo Video’s platform – powered by generative AI – helps companies increase sales engagement with hyper-personalized, interactive video content delivered at scale, which drives a significant increase in meetings booked and improves win rates. Using Hippo Video’s patent-pending AI Editor increases sales teams’ productivity and efficiency so they can achieve revenue goals without additional resources, budgets, or tools.
About Dallas Venture Capital
DVC is a Dallas TX, US and Hyderabad, India based venture capital firm investing in cloud infrastructure, B2B SaaS, AI/ML, mobile, XR and other emerging technologies. In addition to providing capital and financing needs, our investment philosophy centers around guiding business development, product, and technology strategy for our portfolio companies through the ‘DVC Advantage’ program to achieve successful outcomes. Operating from both the US and India, DVC creates a bridge that connects two of the largest start-up ecosystems in the world. DVC is co-founded by Dayakar Puskoor, a pioneering Dallas based venture capitalist with a record of investments in 25+ companies and 9 exits to date, and Abidali Neemuchwala, the former CEO of Wipro Ltd.
