Can we get introduced to the Founder/s of VideoKen?
VideoKen Inc. is co-founded by Manish Gupta, Ashish Vikram, and Vishnu Raned.

Manish Gupta is the CEO of VideoKen. He has served as the Vice President and Director of Xerox Research Centre India and has held various leadership positions with IBM, including that of Director, IBM Research - India and Chief Technologist, IBM India/South Asia. As a Senior Manager at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, Manish led the team developing system software for the Blue Gene/L supercomputer. In 2009, IBM was awarded a National Medal of Technology and Innovation for Blue Gene by then US President Barack Obama.

Manish holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and is a distinguished alumnus of IIT Delhi. He has co-authored about 75 papers and has been granted 19 US patents. While at IBM, Manish received two Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards, an Outstanding Innovation Award, and the Lou Gerstner Team Award for Client Excellence.

Ashish Vikram is the CTO of Videoken and is a software industry veteran. A graduate of IIT Delhi (which is where he met Manish and they have been friends ever since) and Purdue University, he started his career in the Silicon Valley in 1989. He moved to Bangalore and set up three new software development organizations from scratch, scaled and nurtured them into highly productive software development labs until eventual acquisition. He then had stints at Yahoo, Bangalore and Flipkart as VP Engineering leading their big data and ads engineering teams.

Ashish has several years of hands-on design and development experience in Systems Software, Big Data, Ad Tech and Product Design.

Vishnu Raned is the CRO of VideoKen and a highly experienced sales leader. He has spent the last 17 years building & leading high performing enterprise software sales organizations.

An alum of Bangalore University and Stuttgart Institute of Management and Technology, Vishnu is a hands-on sales leader and has worked in numerous markets including Asia-Pacific, Japan, and other emerging markets.

What is the Vision behind the idea of VideoKen? How did it originate?

VideoKen began as a research project at Xerox Labs, headed by Manish. When Xerox went through a major transition and split into two companies, Manish spun it out and bought the rights for the Intellectual Property (IP) of the project to setup a new company. He was then joined by Ashish, his classmate and friend since their days in IIT Delhi, and Vishnu, a colleague and friend of Ashish's since their time together at IBM Rational.

The trio saw a huge potential in the enterprise video market. Their vision is to help utilize the full potential of videos for informational purposes, including employee learning, sales enablement, technical marketing and communication. Despite a large investment from enterprises in creating informational videos, the benefits are often not adequately realized. VideoKen provides technology to make these videos easier to find, less opaque and more interactive for a highly engaging viewing experience.

What does the name ‘VideoKen’ suggest? How did it come into place?

VideoKen is a composite of 'Video', the medium and 'Ken', which means knowledge. The name VideoKen suggests 'gaining knowledge through videos.'

What have been the key challenges and bottlenecks faced in the Journey of VideoKen till date?

VideoKen started as a provider of a learning platform that would allow organizations to put together their own customized learning material by curating freely available, high quality content. While some organizations adopted it and derived value in the form of higher quality at lower cost, many other organizations were reluctant to change their existing learning management systems and showed interest in the unique video indexing and search capabilities of the VideoKen learning platform. Based on this interest from customers, VideoKen launched an AI engine for videos as an additional, standalone product. This product is applicable to a broader class of videos beyond learning, including marketing, sales enablement and communication, and has seen rapid adoption by various enterprises for a variety of the above use cases.





What are some of the key Features of VideoKen indexed Videos? How does it help in getting a better ROI?

VideoKen neatly summarizes videos and provides them with AI generated table of contents, phrase cloud, and a transcript search. A user can click on any topic and immediately navigate to a specific point in a video where that particular topic is discussed.

By eliminating the need for a viewer to run through the entire video to find something specific (and not know where it is on the video timeline), and with a table of contents that is visible even before the video plays, the viewer engagement rates goes up and the video creators get better ROI on the videos produced. VideoKen data shows the aggregate watch time of videos typically going up by 2-4x (and as high as 9x for some videos).

We would you like to know some statistical achievements of VideoKen.

Enterprises that use VideoKen include Accenture, Bosch, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Netgear, Oracle, and TCS. Another class of customers is e-learning companies, such as UpGrad and TalentSprint, and universities, such as University of Mumbai and Meghe Group of Institutions. Some of the public websites using VideoKen include ACM Webinars and prestigious conferences like NeurIPS, ACM MobiCom, and Falling Walls. VideoKen has over 15,000 active monthly users.

Where do you envision to see the above numbers reach in the next 2-3 years?

We expect to acquire over a hundred enterprise customers and cumulatively reach a few million users over the next 2-3 years. While we are serving businesses and not directly consumers, we continue to track the number of active users as a measure of our overall impact. We expect to have several hundred thousand active monthly users over the next 2-3 years.



What have been Other Achievements of VideoKen?

VideoKen has been felicitated numerous times, including:

• Best in class AI start-up at the NASSCOM Technology & Leadership Forum, 2019
• NASSCOM AI Game Changer Award, 2018
• Part of the Microsoft Accelerator Cohort, 2017
• Winner of Elevate 100, a Karnataka Government initiative, 2017

Have you managed to raise any Funding? How are you funded?

VideoKen has raised 2 rounds of angel and seed funding, for a total of $1.93 million. VideoKen is funded by SRI Capital, Touchstone Equities, Hyderabad Angels, and angel investors, including current and former Flipkart executives.

What was the Go-To Market Strategy at the time of inception with many other brands already into it?

VideoKen has been offered as a SaaS solution directly to enterprises, e-learning companies and universities. The VideoKen AI engine has been integrated with several enterprise video platforms like Kaltura, Brightcove, JW Player, TalkPoint and Zoom. It is now being taken to market also through partnerships with these video platform providers.


Which are the current Operational Cities of VideoKen? Are there any expansion plans on the cards?

We have offices in Bangalore and Princeton, NJ, USA. With our Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, we are already serving customers across many parts of the world, including US, Japan, Germany and India. We plan to grow our presence in the US during the coming months.

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