Jacques Blom, Ilce Perez, Lenny Bogdonoff and Ross Cranwell from the Milk Video team. Image: Marco Giannavola/Milk Video
The New York-based start-up is developing an app to help businesses turn video content into short marketing highlights.
New York-based start-up Milk Video has announced the raising of $1.5m in seed funding led by Y Combinator and HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah.
Founded in 2020 by Lenny Bogdonoff and Dublin native Ross Cranwell, Milk Video builds software that helps companies turn longer-form video into short highlights for marketing and advertising purposes.
As well as Shah and Y Combinator, the round saw participation from the co-founders of Optimizely; Chris Savage, CEO and founder of Wistia; Esther Crawford, who sold her start-up Squad to Twitter; Altair Capital; and Amino Capital, among others.
The company plans to use the funding to grow its engineering and marketing capabilities, add features to its software and develop third-party integrations, including with Zoom.
“The massive spike in webinars, Zooms and virtual events has meant that hours of raw, unedited video content are sitting in archives completely underutilised,” said Bogdonoff, Milk Video’s CTO.
“With Milk Video, go-to-market teams who don’t have professional design experience can now edit, design and share video snippets from these recordings in minutes instead of hours.”
Shah added: “I love tools that help you do things that you know you should be doing – but you don’t, because it’s too annoying. Milk Video unlocks the full potential of video for marketers and sales teams by pulling highlights in seconds.
“Milk Video makes it easy to get more out of the video content you already have. It’s the way this should have worked all along.
Irishman Cranwell, who is the start-up’s CEO, continued: “With apps like TikTok, we’ve seen how individuals can quickly edit and design video – but the B2B space falls far behind in this area.”
“60-minute webinars may be the norm now, but short-form, engaging content is the future for marketers to drive awareness and for sales and customer success teams to drive revenue and product adoption.”
Short-form video is an increasingly important medium as competition increases between social media giants in this area. Milk Video is not the first company to try to reimagine video for the business world either, with the recent announcement of Salesforce’s professional-focused streaming platform.
