Giving people power of videos
Rocketium’s platform helps create professional-looking videos, writes SamreenAhmad
When Satej Sirur and Anurag Dwivedi were working at cab aggregator TaxiForSure, they wanted to drive a new business. So in 2015, after TaxiForSure was sold to Ola and with the outburst of video content across categories, the duo utilised their computer science background and founded Rocketium, a platform which lets anyone create professional-looking videos.
Videos are effective in conveying a message but take a lot of time to create and require designers. The Rocketium team wanted to enable everyone to create dynamic and engaging content. At first, they experimented with slideshow versions of written articles on social media, which were later transformed into videos on the customer demand. With over two-thirds of the internet bandwidth consumed by videos, the computer science graduates saw an opportunity in the sector and came up with a software which automates the work of a digital designer.
“A typical 60-second video today requires two to three hours, a professional video designer, and a high-end computer for video rendering. On Rocketium, the same video can be created in 15-30 minutes,” explained Sirur, saying the company is trying to change the digital experience like Adobe.
The Bengaluru-based startup recently raised ~20 million from Blume Ventures and angel investors such as TaxiForSure CEO Raghunandan G, BigBasket HR Head Hari TN, and senior management from Apple, Freshworks, Microsoft, and SpaceX.
Opportunity
What a Wordpress does for websites, Rocketium is trying to do the same for videos where you can write a series of text, link each of them with an image, customise the styling according to your needs and then the software stitches all together to produce a video.
With news organisations in India embracing technology, social media, and mobile are reaching an ever-growing audience. People have a short attention span and want bite-sized and appealing content. The opportunity is larger when it comes to non-English speaking audiences who are hungry for good video content. The startup also has translation services to make videos in over a 100 languages, catering to this audience, said Sirur.
Revenue model
It is a subscription-based platform where businesses pay monthly to create videos. There is also a free version which has got the start-up a lot of visibility but the videos created here have the company’s watermark. The typical cost per video is ~100 and it goes down as customers make more videos.
The company, which already has its 90 per cent market in the US and the UK, will be using the funds to expand its global footprint further by hiring sales and marketing talent and building a machine intelligence team to further automate the video creation process. Over 5,000 media channels, non-profit organisations and universities from 57 countries use Rocketium to create videos on a daily basis. The company clocked in a revenue of ~15 million in the previous financial year and is looking at the ~60-million revenue mark by the end of this financial year. Over the next threefive years, it is also looking to launch products customised for e-commerce, advertising, and learning.
However, not all businesses have adopted videos and the company has to educate these about the power of video. The Rocketium team believes a picture speaks a thousand words but videos do a lot more with motion and sound. “The rise of the video is undeniable and will continue for many more years. We are confident we will soon not have to convince anyone about the need for videos,” said Sirur.