Paronym, a Tokyo-based startup that develops and provides interactive video solutions, announced on Tuesday the completion of its USD 6.5 million Series B round funding round led by Japan Post Capital and NTT Docomo Ventures. InVent, the venture capital arm of Thailand’s telecom giant Intouch Holdings, also participated in the round.
Founded in 2016, Paronym offers a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform named TIG, an interactive video technology that allows users to retrieve information and tag objects such as persons, places, clothing, and music, from videos by touching key points, objects, or images on the screen. It also provides a tracking and editing tool that enables users to match objects in a clip with link destinations, plus a heat map tool that tells which part of the clip users are tapping.
According to the company’s website, businesses can interact with their customers on e-commerce and travel guide sites with the use of TIG to generate interactive video content.
“We aim to first enhance our presence in Thailand and eventually establish it as a service that is socially implemented in Southeast Asia,” said Michio Kobayashi, CEO of Paronym.
The B2B platform is available on a monthly subscription or license basis for companies that need to create, edit, and managing videos, while the firm also offers an enterprise model that supports companies to adopt the TIG technology into their app or website. The platform has been adopted by an array of companies including Japanese news network station Chukyo TV, mobile phone operator NTT Docomo, and retail brand The North Face.
“We aim to provide innovative services in the video market in Thailand in the future. Thailand, which is the largest digitally advanced nation in Southeast Asia, has an e-commerce penetration rate (EC rate) of over 40% while the e-commerce market is also predicted to increase from USD 900 million in 2015 to USD 13 billion in 2024,” Kobayashi said.
Southeast Asia’s internet economy is set to grow to USD 300 billion by 2025, compared with USD 100 billion in 2019, according to a report by Google, Temasek and Bain & Company in 2019. The region has over 360 million internet users and 90% of them connect to the internet primarily through their mobile phones.