Suvrat Bhooshan, founder and CEO of Gan.ai
Consumers have gotten very used to receiving personalised emails from corporations – offering them a special deal, say, urging them to renew a subscription, or simply thanking them for his or her support. But what should you could send personalised videos to your customers in the identical way – addressing them with a private greeting from someone in your enterprise, or a celeb endorser or brand ambassador? That’s the technology now offered by Californian start-up Gan.ai, which is today announcing a $5.25 million seed funding round.
Founded in March 2021 by Suvrat Bhooshan, who had previously worked in Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) research team, Gan.ai has already signed up a string of blue-chip clients, starting from cell phone giants akin to Samsung to healthcare conglomerates like Eyecare Partners, and even sports teams. “Personalisation and targeted outreach almost all the time improve conversion percentages, but there was no easy technique to do it scalably with videos,” explains Bhooshan. “We set out to unravel this problem.”
The technology could also be sophisticated, but the concept is straightforward enough. Corporations aiming to achieve out to customers just must record one video with the messaging they need to deliver. Gan.ai’s technology can then create personalised versions of that video for each customer that the corporate desires to contact; it replicates the voice of the person making the video and adjusts their lip movements in each version, in order that what customers receive feels completely human. In each video, the corporate can address each customer by name and tweak other variables in accordance with the aim of the message.
Bhooshan says the impact of personalised video to this point has been dramatic. Customers receiving a video are five times’ more prone to watch it to the top than those that receive a generic message, he claims. Conversion rates on campaigns might be as much as 10 times higher. One Indian cricket team has even used the technology to send personalised videos from players to fans who comment on its Instagram feed, prompting tens of hundreds of responses.
One early adopter of Gan.ai’s tools, the gaming platform Mobile Premier League, is definitely impressed. “We record videos with influencers and celebrities and now, with Gan.ai, they call out your name and offer you a personalised call-to-action,” explains the Tejnoor Grover, a senior manager on the firm. “We saw a five times’ increase in our video completion rate, a thrice’ increase in our open rates, and a 1.5 times’ increase in our click-through rate.”
Gan.ai believes its technology represents a major advance in a fast-growing field. The worldwide generative AI video market was price around $470 million last 12 months in accordance with Grand View Research, but is predicted to grow at an annualised rate of 20% between 2023 and 2030.
The competition is hotting up, but Bhooshan says Gan.ai is considered one of only a handful of corporations that makes videos using real videos. Should you want your CEO to front your video, its technology could make that occur; should you’ve hired a celeb influencer, that’s fantastic too. Against this, rival and better-known corporations including Synthesia and HourOne create avatars to front their videos – these are virtual humans, albeit often very convincing and impactful.
Gan.ai’s approach is demanding technically, says Bhooshan, but rewarding should you get it right. “It’s a much harder problem to match the voice tonality and texture on either side in order to not appear edited, and similarly to vary lip movements to match the brand new audio while keeping the remaining of the video as is,” he explains. “Persons are very quick to note changes so the bar for quality is far higher.”
The corporate’s monetisation strategy is to supply two versions of the product. Large enterprise customers searching for the highest-quality production values pay a premium price, while a less expensive self-serve option is geared toward smaller businesses who create the primary video themselves with a web-cam. The service also comes with analytics tools to assist customers assess the impact of their campaigns.
With latest funding now available, Gan.ai hopes to speed up its expansion, with its seed finance earmarked for an expansion of the engineering team and investment in its go-to-market activities. The $5.25 million round was led by Surge and Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, with participation from Emergent Ventures and quite a lot of angel investors.
The corporate has also won support from non-financial backers. It was named as considered one of the 200 technologies of the long run at TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, and is a member of Stanford University’s StartX cohort for 2023.
