As 2021 draws to a close, Replai’s CEO Joao Vieira da Costa explores the trends behind our most successful year yet. From a second round of fundraising, to tripling the size of the team, it has been a busy 12 months. But what is in store for 2022, and what exciting developments are on the horizon for our customers?
According to Cisco, 80% of consumer internet traffic is video. Which shouldn’t be surprising given the year the world has just experienced. Our workplaces, shopping habits and social interactions have been accelerated towards digitisation as a result of the pandemic. Whether scrolling through instagram, or filling our lunch breaks with Youtube, video is the king of content. For Replai, this means that we have had an extraordinarily busy year.
Replai is all about reducing guesswork
The heart of our business is about helping creatives and marketing departments understand what works and what doesn’t in their video content. Our AI can automatically identify and evaluate everything from the colour of your characters hair, to the best frame rate for driving conversions. Our platform offers data which ultimately improves the win-rate of the video content your creative departments produce. It reduces guesswork.
We believe that this feature, the reduction of guesswork, is one of the key factors behind our continued success in the past year. Following a widely subscribed pre-seed investment round in 2020, we saw demand for our product outstrip supply to the extent that we closed a 4.7 million seed funding round this September. This round was led by visionaries such as Hoxton, Sonae IM, Lux Capital, Sequoia, and Accel — and includes expanded participation from existing investors — to bring our total funding to date to $6 million. With this capital injection we have tripled the size of our team in the last year alone, and have increased our company valuation by a factor of ten.
A new era in privacy policies and protection reaffirms the importance of creatives
In addition to our fantastic product, there has been another external factor which has changed the playing field for digital marketing. 2021 saw fundamental changes to user data protection across a range of platforms. Apple implemented IDFA, and in doing so reduced much of the insights that digital marketing departments and creatives have relied upon for years. This has necessitated a strategic return to the drawing board.
Now content must be designed to be appealing to a wider public, instead of pre-selecting your audience from those most likely to be enthusiastic towards your product. This creative-first approach goes hand in hand with the way the Replai platform functions. As such, we have been able to fill this data gap across every vertical of the digital marketing industry. Whether your video content supports the gaming industry, or an influencer on instagram, our insights have supported creatives in improving their video conversion metrics.
The future is about combining the best people with a unique approach to AI driven video analysis
So where do all of these changes leave Replai at the end of 2021? We have assembled our engine for growth, building out a brand new Customer Success department, and supporting that with world class leadership for our business development team. We have dramatically grown our customer base, with the vision to eventually support every vertical in the digital video marketing ecosystem. In short, we have laid the groundwork for 2022 to be even busier.
But to ensure that continued success we will be focusing on a few key things in the coming year. First, we want to improve the customisation of the machine learning behind our product. Our ambition is to develop the capacity to automatically identify every element in every type of video and then measure it. This would reduce the need for any additional manual tagging, and deliver data and insights that our customers didn’t even know they needed!
Second, we will be looking to expand our business development team with motivated, excited people who share our vision. We will be particularly prioritising those with an understanding of SaaS sales, to better improve the experience of our customers. To that end, if you think you fit the bill then check out our open positions.
Cheers to building on success in 2022
Clearly, this year has been more successful than we could have imagined when Francisco and I founded Replai two short years ago. We put that success down to the incredible, hard-working (and sometimes crazy) team we have built. We couldn’t have achieved this much growth, this rapidly without them. To that end, I wanted to close out this wrap-up of 2021 with a heartfelt thanks for their continued diligence. We are all looking forward to having even more reason to celebrate in 2022!