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Emovid CEO Victor Cho in a screen grab of a video message generated by his platform. (Image via Emovid)
Emovid, the startup aiming to upend business communication with a focus on video messaging, raised nearly $7 million in seed funding, the company announced Wednesday.
Emovid emerged from stealth summer, and CEO Victor Cho told GeekWire that the goal is to do away with billions of written emails workers send every day and replace them with asynchronous video messages — content that is not live streamed but rather recorded and shared for later viewing.
The Emovid platform enables communication via unscripted 2- to 5-minute videos instead of long meetings or lengthy e-mails. Cho calls it a more authentic way of communicating.
“Over the past year, we have demonstrated that our features solve real problems for our customers, and we are now ready for a full product launch and further development of our generative AI capabilities,” Cho said in a statement.
Emovid videos can be recorded and sent directly from the startup’s platform and can be also embedded into an existing email client or dropped into a LinkedIn message, a messaging app, on Facebook or elsewhere.
Emovid also taps into generative AI, producing a summary of each video and a full transcript. Al also improves the background in a video as well as the appearance of a speaker as needed. But there’s no deepfake at play — Emovid is adamant about verifying who is doing the communicating and adds an “authenticity verified” seal to each video.
Cho, who is based in San Francisco, led the digital invitation company Evite for more than seven years. He previously worked at Microsoft, Intuit and Eastman Kodak, and holds board positions with a number of organizations.
Cho’s co-founders include Digvijay Chauhan, Emovid’s Seattle-based CTO, and chief experience officer Rupali Pathania.
The round was led by o-kaisha Investments, the investment arm of the Oki Family Office. Scott Oki was a senior vice-president of sales and marketing for Microsoft.
The new cash will be used to expand Emovid’s availability through more product tiers; invest in new AI features; and secure distribution and marketing partnerships.
