AI Tech Startup VideoKen Raises $930,000 led by SRI Capital, Touchstone

Princeton and Bangalore based Artificial Intelligence video tech start-up VideoKen Inc. has raised $930,000 in their second round of seed funding led by SRI Capital and Touchstone Equities, with Hyderabad Angels being the other major investor. Several angel investors, including existing investor L. G. Chandrasekhar of Sutures India and angel investors from Flipkart, ex-Yahoo, and others also participated.

This funding will be used to expand VideoKen's operations in the North America region, which has a huge market potential for their video indexing technology.

Founded by former Flipkart and Xerox executives, VideoKen is working in the largely untapped video indexing space and using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to summarize videos and create automated index and glossary for videos. "Enterprises are producing and consuming videos in a big way for a variety of stakeholders – customers, partners and employees. The consumability of these videos remains a huge challenge, the experience needs a complete transformation.", says Manish Gupta, co-founder and CEO of VideoKen.

VideoKen currently has two products - one aimed at the marketing and communication functions of enterprises, and the other is aimed at the learning vertical. VideoKen already boasts of several large clients such as Walmart Labs, Robert Bosch, TCS, ACM and ADBI, among others.

Speaking about what makes VideoKen unique, Manish Gupta adds, "We uncover deep hidden information inside videos and make it easily searchable and navigable. Creating indices which show the key topics being covered by a video leads to a much more engaged viewing experience and better ROI on videos. And all of it is powered by AI, which makes it effortless to implement, and allows for a more productive use of the videos."

Headquartered in Princeton, NJ and with an R&D lab in Bangalore, India, VideoKen has a small but strong engineering team working across artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, and computer vision to make videos that much more consumable.

Sashi Reddi, Managing Partner, SRI Capital, said: "Videos account for roughly 75% of the internet traffic and their usage by enterprises continues to increase. We will soon see a paradigm shift in how videos are consumed and I'm glad to see VideoKen at the forefront of this change. I am confident that this investment will enable the VideoKen team to establish a leadership position in this emerging space."