Videobot, a Finnish SaaS online customer engagement startup, just raised €2m in seed funding. In conjunction with the announcement, co-founder Anssi Kiviranta replied to our questions about the company, the product, the round and future plans.
1. Hi Anssi. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I’ve been founding several successful journeys since 2000. For example, I came up with an idea of a new kind of online tv-guide, Telkku.com, and lead the company from a zero to 1 million user online service. Telkku.com was acquired by Alma Media Oyj in 2008. I’m also a co-founder of Bo LKV, a disruptive real estate company and a lifestyle brand that was founded in 2015. In just a few years, Bo LKV has grown from zero to 23 000 000€ (2019) in revenue with almost 200 professionals.
Both myself and co-founder Matias Mäenpää are experienced and enthusiastic entrepreneurs. We’re always eager to create something new and also interested in sports. In business, just like in sports, we are ambitious to try to reach as high a level as possible, and with Videobot we are aiming to build a unicorn-level company.
2. Let’s speak about Videobot. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
Nobody wants to read long walls of text on websites anymore. Video content now makes up 80% of internet traffic, and demand is continuing to escalate. Our attention spans online are lower than ever; brands and companies have a mere second to engage their audiences’ attention online. What’s more, over 70% of people want to hear about new products and services in video format.
Videobot seamlessly taps into this transformative shift in behavior, opening new horizons for businesses to connect with their audiences. Quite simply, we see a future where fully video-based websites are the norm across industries. Companies that don’t adopt the shift to video will be left behind.
3. What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
Video chatbots represent a whole new SaaS category. Videobot’s solution is unique in that it combines the interactive elements of chatbots with the engaging qualities of short videos to create an experience far more natural and human than any text-driven chatbot is capable of. Videobot’s fusion of these two technologies results in a game-changing tool to engage website visitors. This essentially comes back to thinking about your own experiences, and what engages you. Was it text, or video? Video mirrors the real world and brings humanity, and emotional connection in a way text can’t. Visuals are part of essential, natural human interaction. It’s embedded in how we consume. It’s this combination that sets Videobot apart.
4. You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
Absolutely, we’ve just secured €2M seed funding, led by Finland’s Superhero Capital, Luxembourg’s Expon Capital Digital Tech Fund, and angel investors, Sweden’s Urban Gillstrom and Finland’s Ari Korhonen. The funding will accelerate Videobot’s growth in Europe and the US.
5. Can you share some numbers and achievements of the business?
Since its founding in 2022, Videobot already has over 200 customers in 15 countries and in multiple diverse industries. We already have several enterprise-level companies as our clients, for example, one of the Nordic region’s biggest banks, as well as a few of the biggest telecom companies in the Nordics. One of the telecom companies told us that they did major A/B testing with Videobot, and were so impressed with the results, they decided to invest more in us.
6. What are your medium-term plans?
Since Videobot’s founding, we’ve been growing rapidly. Our aim is to secure one thousand customers and annual billing of three million euros by the end of 2024, with an objective of growing their team to 50 employees. Longer-term we want Videobot to be the go-to choice, as the original video-based chatbot in a world where video is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ feature, but a business essential.
FinSMEs
29/08/2023