Ravish Ailinani

Ravish Ailinani

Ravish Ailinani, Partner of Dallas Venture Capital (DVC). Ravish Ailinani has extensive experience in corporate strategy, finance and venture capital investments. He has over $70B of announced transaction experience including M&A, IPOs, growth stage investing, equity and debt capital market transactions and capital raises.

Why DVC Invested in Hippo Video

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While our lives continue to migrate online, the most engaging online content is that which is most similar to our offline lives: video-based, personalized, and real-time. We see this in the rise of consumer applications like TikTok, whose video-based social media platform zoomed past Instagram in user engagement per post (18% for TikTok compared to 4% for Instagram) and also prompted Instagram to build a fast-follow copycat video feature itself. Videos don’t just drive more engagement – they also drive higher quality engagement. Per marketing firm Insivia, viewers retain 95% of a message when relayed in a video vs. only 10% when reading it in text. This is human nature as the human brain is estimated to process images at least 6 times faster than text.
The emergence of online video has been a trend for years and was only accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. We all began to consume more entertainment online, but we also moved a lot of our workplace interactions online. While virtual meetings have supplanted in-person meetings, enterprises have not sufficiently leveraged video where it matters most: in their customer interactions.
DVC firmly believes that video can play a much larger role in the workplace. To-date, companies have had to rely on expensive, high-touch agencies to create high quality video content. Furthermore, this content would not be personalized or real-time in nature. This is why we are excited to invest in a robust, interactive video-based customer engagement platform like Hippo Video.
With Hippo Video, employees have at their fingertips what was previously reserved for large enterprises with vast marketing budgets. Humanize AI, Hippo Video’s generative AI engine, gives users the power to create hundreds of hyper-personalized videos in a single day, driving more meetings booked, higher engagement, and improved win rates.
Hippo Video has comprehensive video creation and editing functionalities. With Hippo Video, even novice users can easily do the following:
  • Create, edit, and host videos
  • Create personalized sales pages
  • Add Call-to-Action buttons
  • Annotate or markup videos
  • Create virtual backgrounds
  • Utilize a virtual teleprompter
That said, Hippo Video is much more powerful than a video editing tool.
With pre-built workflows and templates that have been thoughtfully built for ease-of-use and time-to-value, users can be up and running in minutes. While the product offers a high degree of customization, these pre-built video templates and landing pages allow users to create engaging, personalized content within minutes. Hippo Video also works within the tools that users already operate within, such as CRMs, email clients, support tools, and collaboration/productivity tools.
Other video tools may require users to go back-and-forth between different point solutions and find workarounds to create impactful video content. Conversely, Hippo Video is directly integrated with a number of leading tools and also offers API access. Below are only a sampling of some of the leading tools that Hippo Video integrates into. Additionally, Hippo Video is extending its reach by building a software development kit (SDK) to offer a white-labeled customer engagement video functionality within other customer-facing apps, such as Lessonly.
Hippo Video’s patent-pending AI Editor removes the complexity associated with scalable video editing. The tool seamlessly transcribes video audio for sales teams to quickly create and share professional-looking videos in just a few clicks. The product also 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. Sales teams can grow their reach exponentially by taking advantage of Hippo Video’s powerful AI features.
While these product offerings have obvious sales and marketing use cases, Hippo Video can really be used across any company for any number of customer-facing interactions, internal training purposes, candidate recruitment, or anywhere else that engaging, personalized video content would be valuable. Below are just a few examples of users and use cases where Hippo Video can change how businesses operate.
Hippo Video produces significant results for its customers. Upon implementing the product, sales teams see meaningful improvement in response rates, leads generated, and sales cycles. Customer success teams see meaningful improvements in existing client open rates, engagement, and meetings booked. Below is a case study describing Hippo Video’s impact when implemented at Freshworks.
Hippo Video has demonstrated steady growth throughout its history and today serves over 1,000 paying customers and over 1.5 million active freemium users. Hippo Video works with companies of all sizes but to-date has focused on the SMB and mid-market, where individual users often take up using Hippo Video before encouraging more widespread or even organization-wide adoption.
Additionally, the company has excellent existing investors and has seen steady growth throughout its history, allowing the team to continue investing in improving the product. Now, with this capital, Hippo Video is well-positioned to continue building out its platform, SDK, and integrations.
Hippo Video is led by founders Karthi Mariappan, Nilamchand Jain, and Srinivasan Krishnan, who all have over 15 years of experience in leadership roles at Zoho and played critical roles in scaling Zoho’s flagship products. Additional members of the Hippo Video team came from Zoho as well as Freshworks, giving Hippo Video a deep bench of operators with experience building products for a global audience.
With our “DVC Advantage” program, we are excited to help accelerate Hippo Video’s growth, aiding in product and technology strategy, executive mentorship, corporate governance, business development, and talent acquisition. In particular, DVC has successfully backed and helped drive growth for several outstanding portfolio companies maintaining operations in both the USA and India.

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