Started in January 2017 by Manish Gupta, former VP & Director, Xerox Research India and Ashish Vikram, former VP of Engineering at Flipkart, the company has raised funds from LG Chandrasekhar, chairman of Sutures India and Sashi Reddi, partner at US based SRI Capital LLC, along with a few current and former executives of Flipkart including Ravi Garikipati (CTO), Hari Vasudev (SVP), Surojit Chatterjee (SVP) and Ashish Agrawal (SVP). Ajay Lavakare, president and co-founder of Stanford Angel Network has also participated in this round. Other investors include Akash Garg (Angel investor and Director of engineering at Uber San Francisco) in addition to other US and Hong Kong based investors.
Microsoft is also supporting VideoKen with Azure Cloud Credits through the Microsoft BizSpark Plus Program as part of their Startup Initiatives coupled with Technology Mentoring.
The platform is built on a foundation of strong research, conducted at Xerox Labs over the last 3 years. The company had purchased all IP rights from Xerox and has multiple patents, currently pending for approval at US Patent and Trademark Office.
VideoKen is a video-based social learning platform, that provides unique capabilities for automatic indexing, search, curation and sharing of educational videos, which can be used to support personalized learning. Potential target audience of the company includes enterprises which recognize the value of lifelong learning for their employees, training organizations and independent trainers who want to use a world class platform, and educational institutions which are at the forefront of adopting modern pedagogy techniques.
The company has started selling in the Indian market. It has signed 5 deals of varying sizes and is in the process of signing agreements with 5-6 additional customers including corporate, educational and training institutions. VideoKen has also begun a pilot in the US, and plans to go after the international markets (especially the US and Europe) later this year.
The platform works on a subscription based model, currently offered at a very low rate to give high value proposition to its clients. “We charge a low subscription fee per learner, roughly equivalent to the price of a single lunch, to support learning for an entire year,” said Manish Gupta, CEO.
The company plans to use this funding to further enhance the world-leading AI capabilities of the VideoKen learning platform and to invest in sales activities to reach out to enterprise customers.
Ashish Vikram, Chief Technical Officer said, “We are adding capabilities for social learning, gamification, and personalization to support more effective engagement with learners and improve their learning outcomes. Later on, we also plan to add support for analyzing a broader class of videos”.
Source: BW Disrupt