ShortTok, an early-stage software company developing automated visual storytelling technologies, announces today that it has secured a financing commitment from Info Edge Ventures, subject to regulatory approvals. This raise is part of ShortTok’s pre-seed round, and will support additional investments in R&D, business development, and operations.
Short-form video has grown explosively, transforming content creation and engagement around the world, and dominating every social media platform. While the initial users have tended to be younger, the popularity of short-form video is already a mainstream phenomenon and is having a major impact on every segment of content and online activity – from sports to news, from search to e-commerce, from travel to education.
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ShortTok will partner with content and media companies globally to introduce automated storytelling technologies and curate highly novel visual stories across their platforms. These short visual stories will be created automatically and at massive scale, in dynamic, adaptive, and personalized forms, and will catalyze content discovery and turbocharge audience engagement.
“I am honored to receive this early support from Info Edge Ventures. Given their extensive experience, domain knowledge, and outstanding track record of guiding so many pioneering startups, Info Edge Ventures is an ideal financing partner for ShortTok. I look forward to working closely with Kitty Agarwal and her team as we undertake this exciting journey together”, said Vikram Nagrani, founder & CEO of ShortTok.
“Automated visual storytelling will power the next frontier of short form video experiences globally. We share the vision of Vikram and his team as they set out to pursue this massive opportunity and introduce these exciting new technologies into the marketplace” said Kitty Agarwal, Partner at Info Edge Ventures.
Vikram Nagrani, founder & CEO of ShortTok, is a serial entrepreneur who has founded innovative companies in mobile software and financial services, with a proven track record of introducing novel products to open up massive new markets. Among his previous ventures, Vikram was the co-founder and CEO of Neonyoyo, a mobile software startup which was acquired by Interwoven (now part of HP) for $70 million.
The pioneering vision for the technical framework at ShortTok is driven by a world class team, led by Dr. Alan Bovik, Chief Technical Advisor (Video Engineering) and Dr. Joydeep Ghosh, Chief Technical Advisor (Artificial Intelligence).
Dr Bovik is a preeminent vision scientist and video engineer who has made fundamental contributions to the fields of digital photography, digital television, digital image processing, digital video processing, digital cinema and computational visual perception. Among his numerous awards and recognitions, he is the winner of the 2022 Edison Medal, a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award in 2021, and a Primetime Emmy Award in 2015.
Dr. Ghosh is a world-renowned thought leader in the fields of data mining and web mining, ethical/trustworthy/responsible AI, scalable machine learning algorithms, specially for predictive and prescriptive analytics, and applications to a wide variety of complex real-world problems. He is the recipient of the 2020 ICDM Research Contribution Award, and has served as co-founder, advisor or consultant to various successful startups.