Israeli startup AnyClip has gone through quite a few changes and pivots since founded in 2007. Now, AnyClip is announcing its new rebrand as “The Visual Intelligence Company” - a SaaS data platform for enterprises and organizations, along with a fresh round of funding.
The YouTube for enterprises
Instead of uploading organizational information onto one of the video platform sites, where customers and employees can easily be distracted by videos of cats, thanks to Google’s algorithms. AnyClips has developed an automated system that harvests data from enterprise video libraries and makes it accessible for company use. The system identifies and catalogs the different videos and content, providing companies with VOD-like (video-on-demand) access to their video content, and more.
“Video is now the leading communications medium for businesses around the world, but this tectonic shift to video has resulted in an infinite amount of new content that’s nearly impossible to navigate,” says CEO Gil Becker.
In most cases, enterprises won’t want video content meant for internal use, such as events, webinars, training videos, conferences, and other “hush hush” stuff, to end up on a public platform like YouTube for all to see. AnyClip has developed a type of internal VOD system that is only accessible by company stakeholders. Gil Becker, AnyClip CEO, notes in a chat with Geektime that the entire process takes only 30 seconds; following the cataloging part, the platform search engine becomes available, allowing position holders to search for specific moments from the library.
Among the company’s customer base, we find VentureBeat, which uses AnyClip to analyze and catalog live events, Chinese multimedia giant Tencent, and Turner which targets consumers with relevant video ads according to data pulled from the Israeli video cataloging system.
Once the VOD-like system is up-and-running, AnyClip also provides video performance analytics, and other than showing users how many views the video had, the analysis dives deeper, offering insight into the most popular speaker in a video, a minute-by-minute breakdown, bounce rate insight, and a lot more. Additionally, the platform automates video editing and adjustment to fit accurately on specific product pages.
“Companies can’t cope with the volume of video content, resulting in wasted video content, and its potentially helpful data. This same data allows the company to offer industry agnostic automation solutions for SME and SMBs,” according to Becker.
Raising millions from its founder
As we mentioned, the company has gone through some changes over the years. It started out as a search engine for clips in movies, later moving on to video ads, and now of course, aiming to establish itself as the enterprise video platform. Today (Tuesday), AnyClip announced the closing of a $47 million funding round, led by JVP. The round also saw participation from La Maison, Bank Mizrahi, and other private investors. The company has 120 employees, with 80 employed in Israel.
Erel Margalit PhD, founder of JVP, also acts as AnyClip’s Board Chairman, and added that "for the first time, AI meets video. Companies and organizations are now working to utilize this to create a new mode of communications, internally and externally, in all areas where video dominates in a much stronger way than text. Whether it's how to create videos for consumers or training videos for the organization, or learning how to manage conferences run by video on zoom which need intelligent management in the retrieving of content. This is a new era, and AnyClip is a vital tool for anyone embarking upon it.”
