The concept of “shoppable video” has been around for at least a decade, with some big companies including Showroom, Firework, Vimeo, YouTube and Klarna getting in on the action.
There have also been startups that have embraced this space and gotten some attention from investors in the past, like Cinematique, which tried it in 2017, Clideo, and more recently Kahani, which doesn’t exactly describe itself as a producer. of “purchasable videos”. ”, but his concept of content videos for e-commerce brands can certainly be considered adjacent.
The latest thing that attracts the attention of investors is the e-commerce video platform Videowisefounded by Romanian-born product designer Claudiu Cioba in 2021. The company now has a cash injection of $3 million in a round that closed earlier this year.
Slack Fund led the round and was joined by the Founder Collective, Underline Ventures, MuVentures, Ratio Ventures, Stan Chudnovsky, Javier Olivan, Ed Baker, Scott Belsky and Gokul Rajaram. The new investment gives Videowise a total of $4.1 million in venture-backed funds, Cioba said in an interview.
After working for over a decade designing products for businesses, Cioba decided to embark on his own entrepreneurial journey, focusing on e-commerce. By talking to industry founders, he learned that the “north star” in driving sales was conversion rate.
“If you can create a product that can impact the bottom line for these e-commerce operators, you could find the right product for the market quite easily,” Cioba said.
Although video creation and consumption on sites like TikTok and Instagram took off during the global pandemic, many e-commerce brands had a “very basic, very horizontal and traditional video experience, nothing that was customizable,” he said.
Cioba said it saw an opportunity to create a better product designed specifically for direct-to-consumer brands and online retailers. In 2022, Videowise launched its video platform product that helps online stores manage and publish video, at scale, to an unlimited number of product pages, collection pages, or blogs, instead of one video per page like other companies.
What sets Videowise apart from some of its competitors, like Vimeo or Firework, are its slideable video playlists and its infrastructure that Cioba says delivers advanced video analytics insights and automation while protecting the speed of streaming. page. Videowise can deliver loading times up to five times faster than traditional video players, he added.
The company’s first integration was with Shopify, where the concept caught on: Videowise currently works with over 600 Shopify and Shopify Plus brands. Has generated more than $1 million in additional revenue from purchases made directly in its video player and has generated more than $25 million in revenue with conversion rates up to 328% since 2021 due to video buyers spending up to four minutes more per page, Cioba said.
One of Videowise’s clients is a handmade soap company. dr squatchwhich, after switching to Videowise, saw a 3.2% increase in revenue per session in the first 30 days, he said.
In the meantime, Cioba intends to use the new funds to add more employees (the company has 30 today) and continue to build out its technology stack with a focus on omnichannel video shopping experiences. He also wants to expand outside of Shopify and is now testing with new Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores.
“We had no revenue last year and we struggled early last year, but after we redesigned our marketing site and started working with midsize and large brands, we saw a huge revenue increase, around 500%, we started looking at with investors,” Cioba said. “There is still a lot of innovation to be developed and a lot of functionality is being asked of us. New features will be released this year in areas we don’t see competitors currently focusing on, and our goal is to be a platform that anyone can integrate with.”
