Video collaboration scale-up, Vloggi announced today it has secured a new strategic angel investor for its current funding round as it chalks up record revenue and customer growth in the three months to April.
Sascha-Manuel Reuter, founder of file transcoding platform Doctape, has committed to a significant investment in the platform, which he says can solve the video content sourcing and management for millions of companies. Doctape was sold to Atlassian in 2014 and is now integrated into all of the Australian software giant’s suite of products.
Reuter has gone on to found two more successful start-ups and is an active angel investor in the Australian ecosystem.
An investor with an eye for technologies that address real business problems, Reuter noted that Vloggi was a powerful platform for brands and marketers serious about exploiting video to transform their messaging and communications.
“What I see in Vloggi is a horizontal tool that solves a lot of pain points around the storage, cataloguing, transcoding and formatting of video at massive scale,” he said.
Reuter joins a private investor from Melbourne in taking a significant position in the company’s current seed round.
The investments come on the back of record revenues for Vloggi, which grew 212 percent in the three months to April 2022, helped by a 325 percent increase in customers. This coincided with Vloggi reaching the critical milestone of 1,000 active campaigns as the platform enjoys increased adoption by brands looking to exploit the greater reach and impact of video communications.
The self-service version of the platform went live in April 2021, followed by several enhancements that have improved the customer experience, for instance allowing users to create their own projects and start collecting videos without needing to interact with the success team at Vloggi.
“After switching on our self-service onboarding flow earlier this year we saw a marked increase in conversions and many more campaigns launched on the platform,” said Vloggi founder and CEO, Justin Wastnage.
Among them is a campaign by American country music star, Tim McGraw, whose team is collecting videos uploaded by his many fans around the US and Canada to use across social media and other channels to promote tours, new releases and other events for the chart-topping artist.
Vloggi’s use case for people working in the arts first emerged throughout the worst of pandemic, with the Australian production of Hamilton The Musical harnessing the platform to drive community engagement and help promote performances in Melbourne, as restrictions eased.
The company has since welcomed a widening array of significant organisations onto the platform, spanning industries from retail, pharmaceuticals, tech, sport, not-for profit, to various leading political and advocacy groups.
Vloggi is also being used increasingly by organisations looking for less invasive alternatives to platforms like Teams and Zoom, exploiting Vloggi’s asynchronous video messaging capabilities, enabling users to make video submissions, rather than sit on video conferences, which is often a more efficient use of time.
“We were a fully remote team and Vloggi effectively replaced the process of recording video conferencing by allowing our team to submit clips at their leisure,” said Mike Sager, GM operations and enablement, MYOB.
“What the pattern of new customers shows us is that collecting video submissions at scale is a key pain point for all types of businesses,” Wastnage added. “When we speak to customers, the typical issues with setting up cloud storage folders, reformatting, tagging, formatting and editing together submissions all come out strongly”.
“On top of this, collecting legal consent forms is a must for any external marketing use of customer videos. When they see our platform does it all, they are visibly relieved”. Further, all projects launched on the Vloggi platform are private, which is a powerful feature for users seeking better ways to manage sensitive content.
Ongoing platform upgrades and more targeted marketing around the many pain points associated with video has meant Vloggi now converts over 16 percent of visitors to its website, with most of these taking up paid plans, rather than the free version.
Vloggi is currently completing a A$1 million seed round, proceeds of which will go to further improving user onboarding, boosting sales and marketing and introducing more automation into the content management system behind the platform. This will be followed by a further funding round of A$2 million, targeting institutional investors, expected to launch before year’s end.
More information on the seed round can be found at vloggi.com/investors.
About Vloggi
Founded in 2018, Sydney tech startup Vloggi is the world’s first collaborative video production platform using AI to process, sort and annotate user-generated video for use by businesses and social groups. It is a registered trademark of parent company, tech investment vehicle Ciné Souk, founded in 2017. The company was founded by Justin Wastnage, a former director of the Tourism & Transport Forum, and founder of the Flight TV aviation video channel. Wastnage started his career with interactive digital television pioneer Static 2358 (later PlayJam) before creating video content for Microsoft. The company’s technical team is headed up by co-founder and CTO, Jeremy Giraudet who developed podcasting distribution and storytelling software for global technology companies. The team is completed by former network TV producer Tarryn Myburgh – now Vloggi’s head of video and customer experience – who has a passion for customer success. Vloggi is based in the Fishburners coworking space within the Sydney Startup Hub (SSH). Investor information at: https://vloggi.com/investors
