Oxolo's €13M Funding: Accelerating AI-Driven Video Platform Innovation

0:00Okay, so today I want to tell you a little bit about Oxlow, which is an AI company that has just, you know, they're in the video realm and they just raised 13 million euros. and this is their series A. I think it's kind of interesting because this whole AI and video thing has been getting a lot more popular. I think we had some recent events like David Beckham's multilingual malaria charity campaign video, which was done with Synthesia, who is a really great video and AI video company who I have a really funny history with, if I haven't already told you. When I first found out about Synthesia last summer, I got an account and I started creating a ton of different, you know what I did?

0:40I was creating an AI podcast. It wasn't about AI. It was about the wellness space because I used to have a software company called SelfPause in the wellness space. And anyways, I was creating an AI generated podcast and Synthesia had the best AI voice that I could find. This is before I found Well Said Labs, which is what I kind of used to scale the business after this whole event happened. But anyways, I made an account. It was like 30 bucks a month. on Synthesia. I threw all my podcasts in there. It would generate a video, but I would just like convert the video to an MP3 or maybe I'd upload the whole video because Spotify for podcasters allows you to upload videos.

1:17In any case, I was, I think I made like 300 episodes on this one account. They didn't have a limit. They were just like, yeah, you pay 30 bucks a month. You can make as many videos as you want. I was like, awesome. So I made like 300 videos. And then I got an email from them saying they shut down my account because of overuse, which I mean, they didn't have a limit so I guess they changed their terms of service because I was destroying their bandwidth which I understand and they said if I wanted access back into the account which by this point I'd already downloaded all the videos actually I had a VA doing this I wasn't doing this myself but I had a VA already had downloaded all the videos and was like posting them so like I didn't need the account anymore but they're like if you want back into your account I can't remember what it was but it was some amount of thousands of dollars a month I was gonna have to pay to get access to the account again and to use that kind of bandwidth so I was just like now whatever like you guys can keep your account.

2:06I already got all my content off of it. I'm not going to pay you guys a few grand. In any case, I definitely understandable that like that was her cost structure, but it was just kind of funny that, you know, I don't know if I was like a loophole or there was a glitch that I got through or something because I was just like, wow, you really can create a ton of content with Synthesia. In any case, Synthesia was kind of the pioneer in this AI video space. And now we're seeing a bunch of other people come in and Oxlo is one of them. So Oxlo, I think they've come a long way in this whole space. I think Synthesia itself has secured about$90 million in funding this year.

2:44So they've raised like$150 million. And so Oxlow is a little bit different. I think essentially generating personalized videos at scale. And if you kind of think of like potentially millions of times over for a whole bunch of different portfolios, that's not very easy. Like I mentioned with the whole Synthesia story, it's very expensive. And there's a lot of manual tweaking that has to go into that too. So Oxlo is kind of getting in on the space. It's a startup from Hamburg, Germany, and they believe that they might have cracked the code using Genre of AI. So the premise is as impressive, I think, as it is efficient, according to them.

3:23But essentially, they're saying, you know, like, think about a firm that wants to conduct a corporate training. So with Oxel's platform, it can tailor make a video based on parameters like the employee's management level, gender location. I think what's even more interesting is the video's capability to, you know, automatically A-B test its own performance. So for instance, an employee, you know, if an employee starts losing interest in a video, the AI could like really quickly come in, tweak and replace the content for better engagement. And I think that this ability is not restricted to training video.

3:57It also extends to product showcases and it's constantly refining them continuously based on viewer interaction. This is such an interesting concept, right? Like imagine, I'm sure if you follow like anything in video, you know that Mr. Beast is one of the biggest video influencers in the world. He essentially is a YouTuber that gives away millions of dollars on YouTube and like does a bunch of shows and competitions, whatever, right? so he spends an enormous amount of money obviously a b testing different thumbnails and you know doing different things to to make sure his videos like perform the highest and keep engagement the longest but but at the end of the day he might spend a million dollars i've heard him say he spent a million dollars on many of his videos like i mean i've seen him give away a million dollars in one video alone but then there's also the entire production there's you know building the the team that's actually filming it and like building the sets like he could spend millions of dollars on some of these videos.

4:51And the problem is when he launches a video, like he does the final edit and I know they edit it like a hundred times, but when they do the final edit and launch it, like it is what it is. Um, wouldn't it be fascinating if he could use some sort of technology like this where, or just kind of this concept really, where essentially he launches a video and real time, the video is adapting and changing. And it's like, Oh, people are losing interest on this scene. Okay. We're going to switch it to this scene instead. Okay. We're going to like chop it up this way we're going to do the cuts like different like it's so fascinating to think of this concept of like the video adapting and changing in real time and that's kind of what oxalo is promising so elizabeth lawrence who is oxalo's co-founder and coo elaborated a little bit on this by saying quote other platforms might offer avatars and templates where users manually input text with oxalo you can simply paste a product link say for socks and voila, your product video is ready to roll.

5:46No manual hassle, no guesswork. I actually think this is also very innovative and impressive. I've seen like the similar technology. Google's doing this with Google Ads where essentially you just upload the website or the link to like your product page and the Google will just make the Google Ads, which I think was fantastic, but that's just obviously text and they just generate text based off of your products for that. This is a whole new thing. You upload your product page and boom, they're making like videos and A-B testing which videos get the best interaction. For ad creatives, absolutely amazing.

6:14I think they're really kind of focusing on corporate training kind of stuff. But I can see some amazing use cases in advertising and other areas. So, Lorange, who, I don't know how we say this. So, her name is L 'orange. So, an American might say Lorange. But I've spent a couple years in France. And so, like, when I see that, I say Lorange. But in any case, I'm not sure how her name is pronounced necessarily. but she was previously associated with Newhouse Partners, and she co-founded Oxlo alongside Hiko Huber, who's kind of known for his past role as the founder and CEO of Bigpoint Games. So the two of them pretty much say that Oxlo's AI can seamlessly weave together images, content, text-to-speech, and humanoid avatars, similar to what Synthesia is doing.

7:03I think the promise held by Oxlowe's quote-unquote magic approach has attracted a bunch of big investors. They've, I think, raised just recently, they just closed this 13 million euro series A round. And I think this was led by DN Capital. Several different German angel investors, including Christian Volman, Johans Plenn, and Stefan Wickersman participated in this. Market growth reports also kind of give a little spotlight to this whole sector. As of 2023, I think the market size for tools facilitating video advertising content creation was between$1 and$1.5 billion. Looking ahead, though, they're actually anticipating it to surge at about 15 % to 20 % CAGR over the upcoming five to seven years, potentially reaching$4.3 billion by 2030.

7:56So a ton of room to grow. I think the technology and creativity are continuing to come with platforms like Oxlo. And I think that this is going to be really interesting to see how this plays out into the future. Definitely a big space to watch is AI in video generation. It's going to change so many industries and have some massive implications. So I'm excited to continue to follow it.