Create, edit and share: Hippo is seeing opportunity in online video market

With 30,000 users globally, Hippo's users have created more than 150,000 videos. Over 80 per cent of its user base is in the US, followed by India and the UK

It would take an individual more than five million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global Intellectual Property (IP) networks each month in 2021, says a Cisco study.

Every second, a million minutes of video content will cross the networks by 2021. Globally, IP video traffic will be 82 per cent of all consumer internet traffic by 2021.

This is the space where Chennai-based Hippo Video is seeing a big opportunity. Founded in 2016, by Karthi Mariappan, Nilam Chand Jain and Srinivasan S, it is a platform aiming to take care of the entire life cycle of video — creating, editing, hosting, sharing, tracking. The company recently raised an undisclosed pre-Series A round from Kae Capital.

With Hippo Video, a browser-based video tool, anyone with access to the internet is able to create professional videos instantly and share it to GDrive, Google Classroom, YouTube and other business software. “This is are already on that is expected by 2021. Videos by common users is the future and we are  already here with Hippo Video,” says Mariappan.

“The online video market for small businesses and independent professionals is a rapidly growing space. Hippo Video’s value proposition as an all-in, easy-to-use, and highly affordable solution appears to have resonated with its target audience and we see signs of product-market fit being established,” says Shubhankar Bhattacharya, venture partner at Kae Capital. 

Its sale proposition includes online video creation, editing and contextual integration with Freshdesk and Zendesk for support, and Google Classroom, Google Slides, Google Docs and D2L for education.

The business to consumer (B2C) video market is pegged at $60 billion. The business to business (B2B) market –collaboration and communication – is estimated at $2.2 billion.

With 30,000 users globally, Hippo’s users have created more than 150,000 videos. Over 80 per cent of its user base is in America, followed by India and Britain. The company aims to focus more in Britain and Australia. The majority of Hippo Video users are customer support staff, educators, freelancers, students, gamers and YouTubers. Currently attracted more towards the education (K-12) sector and its support market, it aims to move to other segments as well.

“We are integrating with the existing system contextually. We want ensure video as a service, be it in any vertical. By 2020, we want to be part of the whole B2B video cycle --including sales, marketing, support and development,” said one of the founders.

The start-up works on a freemium model for revenue. For B2C customers its charges a maximum $30 a year. For B2B clients, $10 a month for customer support with a restricted bandwidth. Users from the education sector have to cough up $3,200 a year for 1,000 students.