Suvrat Bhooshan, Founder and CEO of Gan.ai
Consumers have become accustomed to receiving personalized emails from companies, such as offering them a special offer, inviting them to renew a subscription or simply thanking them for their support. But what if you could send personalized videos to your customers the same way – giving them a personal greeting from someone in your company, or a celebrity or brand ambassador? This is the technology now offered by the Californian start-up Gan.ai, which today announced a funding round of 5.25 million dollars.
Founded in March 2021 by Suvrat Bhooshan, who previously worked in Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) research team, Gan.ai has already signed a string of blue-chip clients, ranging from mobile giants such as Samsung to consumer goods companies like Mondelez, and even sports teams. “Personalization and targeted reach almost always improve conversion percentages, but there was no easy way to do that in a scalable way with videos,” says Bhooshan. “We decided to solve this problem.”
The technology may be sophisticated, but the idea is quite simple. Businesses that want to reach their customers need only record a video with the message they want to spread. Gan.ai’s technology can then create personalized versions of this video for each customer the company wishes to contact; he reproduces the voice of the person making the video and adjusts his lip movements in each version, so that what customers receive is completely human. In each video, the company can address each customer by name and change other variables depending on the purpose of the message.
Bhooshan says the impact of personalized video so far has been dramatic. Customers who receive a video are five times more likely to watch it to the end than those who receive a generic message, he claims. Conversion rates on campaigns can be up to 10x higher. An Indian cricket team has even used technology to send personalized videos of players to fans commenting on its Instagram feed, prompting tens of thousands of responses.
One of the first users of the tools of Gan.ai, the Mobile Premier League gaming platform, is certainly impressed. “We record videos with influencers and celebrities and now with Gan.ai they call your name and give you a personalized call to action,” says Tejnoor Grover, senior executive at the company. “We saw a five-fold increase in our video completion rate, a three-fold increase in our open rates, and a 1.5-fold increase in our click-through rate.”
Gan.ai believes its technology represents a significant advance in a growing field. The global generative AI video market was worth around $470 million last year according to Grand View Research, but is expected to grow at an annualized rate of 20% between 2023 and 2030.
The competition is heating up, but Bhooshan says Gan.ai is one of the few companies creating videos using real videos. If you want your CEO to promote your video, his technology can make it happen; if you’ve hired an influential celebrity, that’s fine too. In contrast, competing and better-known companies, such as Synthesia and HourOne, create avatars to showcase their videos – these are virtual humans, though often very compelling and impactful.
Gan.ai’s approach is technically demanding, says Bhooshan, but rewarding if you can get it right. “It’s a much harder problem to match the pitch and texture of the voice on either side so it doesn’t appear edited, and similarly to change the lip movements to match the new audio while keeping the rest of the video as is,” he explains. “People notice changes very quickly, so the bar for quality is much higher.”
The company’s monetization strategy is to offer two versions of the product. Large enterprise customers looking for the highest quality production values pay a premium price, while a cheaper self-service option is for smaller businesses creating the first video themselves with a webcam. The service also comes with analytics tools to help clients gauge the impact of their campaigns.
With new funding now available, Gan.ai hopes to accelerate its expansion, with its seed funding earmarked for expanding the engineering team and investing in its go-to-market activities. The $5.25 million round was led by Surge and Sequoia Capital India and Southeast Asia, with participation from Emergent Ventures and a number of angel investors.
The company has also secured support from non-financial backers. It was named as one of the 200 technologies of the future at TechCrunch Disrupt 2022 and is a member of Stanford University’s StartX cohort for 2023.
