Hippo Video receives $4.5m fund in Series A round led by Alpha Wave Incubation and Exfinity Venture Partners

Hippo Video 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 global alternative asset manager, and backed by ADQ, a regional holding company 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.

“With the increasing role of video in communication and social media, Hippo Video looks to capitalize on video as a key decision influencer and trust driver. Hippo Video drives sales, marketing, and overall customer experience through our REALTM platform. Through personalized videos created by Hippo Video, sales teams can achieve productivity increases of up to 3x,” said CEO and Founder of Hippo Video, Karthi Mariappan.

Hippo Video offers complete solutions across creation, delivery, and measurement of metrics for personalized videos. Founded by an ex-Zoho team, Hippo Video also offers technological innovations such as rich online pro-editing, on the fly in-video personalization 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.

“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” said Navroz D. Udwadia, Co-founder and Partner at Falcon Edge Capital.

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.

“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 Shailesh Ghorpade, Managing Partner and CIO at Exfinity Venture Partners.

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.

“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 Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at KAE Capital.