Hippo Video

About Hippo Video

Hippo Video offers a B2B SaaS platform specializing in AI-powered video creation and distribution, designed to help businesses enhance engagement across sales, marketing, and customer support functions. The company was founded in 2016 by Karthi Mariappan, Nilamchand Jain, and Srinivasan S, three former colleagues from Zoho. The founding team leveraged their extensive collective experience of over 50 years in building and marketing SaaS products at Zoho to establish Hippo Video. CEO Karthi Mariappan, who spent 16 years at Zoho, has a background in product strategy, management, and marketing, where he was instrumental in developing several successful products from the ground up. This deep expertise in the SaaS landscape shaped Hippo Video's mission to address a key market need: simplifying video production for businesses that found it too time-consuming and resource-intensive.

The company operates on a subscription-based model, providing a suite of tools that enable users to create, personalize, and track video performance. Its target clients range from go-to-market teams looking to boost outreach effectiveness to learning and development departments creating training materials. Key features of the platform include text-to-video generation, interactive human avatars, screen and webcam recording, and an AI script generator. A significant differentiator is its "Humanize AI" engine, which allows for the creation of hundreds of hyper-personalized videos daily, and its Video Flow feature, which combines personal introductions with pre-recorded content to create customized messages efficiently. This focus on scalable personalization helps clients like Genesys, HP, and Freshworks increase response rates and shorten sales cycles.

Headquartered in Newark, Delaware, with offices in India, Hippo Video has steadily grown its client base to over 5,000 companies globally. The startup has successfully navigated multiple funding rounds, securing a total of $14 million. Its financing journey includes a seed round from Sequoia Surge, a $4.5 million Series A round in 2020, and an $8 million Series B round in February 2023, led by Dallas Venture Capital. This capital is being used to expand its presence in the U.S. market and to further innovate its product offerings, with a roadmap that includes features like converting PowerPoint presentations directly into videos.