VideoKen, an artificial intelligence and machine learning based platform for video-based collaborative learning, has announced that it has raised $1 million from a bunch of angel investors.
The company has raised funding from LG Chandrasekhar, chairman of Sutures India and Sashi Reddi, partner at U.S-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 U.S and Hong Kong-based investors.
The company has also secured a place in the Microsoft BizSpark Plus program, and as a part of that program, VideoKen has received Azure Cloud Credits along with Technology Mentoring.
It plans to use this newly raised funding to further enhance the artificial intelligence capabilities of the VideoKen learning platform and to invest in sales activities to reach out to enterprise customers.
The company was founded in January 2017 by Manish Gupta, former VP & Director, Xerox Research India and Ashish Vikram, former VP of Engineering at Flipkart. It claims that the platform is built on a foundation of strong research, conducted at Xerox Labs over the last 3 years. The startup has also purchased all IP rights from Xerox and has multiple patents, currently pending for approval at U.S 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.
The 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 platform works on a subscription-based model, which the company says is currently offered at a very low rate to give high value proposition to its clients. It charges a low subscription fee per learner for an entire year.
So far, the company 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 U.S and plans to go after the international markets later this year.
