The concept of “videos for sale” has been around for at least a decade, with big companies like Showroom, Firework, Vimeo, YouTube and Klarna getting in on the action.
Startups embracing this space have also received some attention from investors in the past, such as Cinematic, in 2017, Clidio and more recently Kahani, which doesn’t exactly define itself as “selling video”, but the concept of content videos for e-commerce brands can definitely be considered on the side.
The latest to catch investors’ attention is an e-commerce video platform founded in 2021 by Romanian-born product designer Claudio Cioba. The company has $3 million in funding from a round it closed earlier this year.
Slack Fund led the round and was joined by Founding Collective, Underline Ventures, MuVentures, Ratio Ventures, Stan Chudnovsky, Javier Olivan, Ed Baker, Scott Belsky and Gokul Rajaram. The new investment in VideoWiz will give it a total of $4.1 million in venture-backed funding, Cioba said in an interview.
After working for more than ten years in product design for companies, Cioba decided to start his own entrepreneurial journey focusing on e-commerce. When talking to founders in the sector, he learned that the “North Star” for driving sales is conversion rate.
“If you can create a product that can impact the bottom line of these e-commerce operators, you can easily tap into the product market,” Cioba said.
Although video creation and video consumption on sites like TikTok and Instagram have taken off during the global pandemic, many e-commerce products have a “very basic video experience, very horizontal and traditional, nothing that can be customized,” he said.
Cioba said he saw an opportunity to build a better product designed specifically for direct-to-consumer brands and online retailers. In the year In 2022, Videowise unveiled its product, a video platform that helps online stores manage and publish videos at scale, with unlimited product pages, collection pages or blogs, with page one video like no other company.
What sets VideoWiz apart from some of its competitors, such as Vimeo or Firework, is that Cioba provides automation and insights from advanced video analytics, as well as its video playlists and infrastructure for maintaining page speed. Videowise can deliver load times up to five times faster than traditional video players, he added.
The company’s first integration was with Shopify, where the idea was born: Videowise currently works with over 600 Shopify and Shopify Plus brands. Generated more than $1 million in additional revenue from direct purchases in the video player and up to 328% revenue from 2021 from video consumers who spent up to four minutes of additional revenue over $25 million.
One of VideoWise’s customers is handmade soap company Dr. Scotch, which says it saw a 3.2 percent increase in revenue per session in the first 30 days after switching to VideoWise.
Meanwhile, Cioba plans to use the new funding to add more employees — the company has 30 today — and continue to develop its technology stack with a focus on omnichannel video marketing practices. It also wants to expand outside of Shopify and is now experimenting with new Salesforce Commerce Cloud stores.
“Last year we didn’t have any income and we were struggling at the beginning of last year, but after we changed our market position and started working with the middle market and big brands, we saw a big increase in income, about 500%, we started consulting with investors,” Cioba said. . “There is a lot of innovation yet to be built and a lot of practicality is being asked of us. New feature releases are coming this year in areas where we haven’t seen competitors focus at the moment, and we aim to be a platform that can blend in with anyone.
