Multipop nabs $2M to make videos shoppable and interactive

If you’re a brand making great promotional videos that showcase your products, the only thing better would be if customers could immediately click somewhere to make purchases or learn more.

Multipop is making that possible, and it now has $2 million in new funding from an unnamed angel investor, it announced today.

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This company’s tech helps brands, marketers, and publishers make their videos interactive. Multipop’s widget wraps around the video and syncs the interactive features to them. This works with videos hosted on a variety of platforms, including YouTube, Vimeo, Limelight, and Brightcove, and any proprietary HTML5 player, according to the company.

Using the web-based tool, brands can create content and add e-commerce, additional ads, polling, and additional information capabilities to their videos and monitor their performance through a dashboard. Multipop also provides a application-programming interface (API) so that developers can plug the analytics into other dashboards they use for their videos.

Multipop, of course, isn’t the only company providing ways for video makers to add interactivity to videos, such as Wirewax, Fuisz, and Zentrick. But unlike its competitors, the company chose to stay away from overlays (putting the interactive objects on top of the video images) because these elements would be “dependent on how long an object is in view,” as Multipop founder and chief executive Josh Lamb said in an email to VentureBeat.

“We are not object dependent and are based on a timeline, giving additional flexibility and consistent results for the content delivered. … We chose not to overlay the video with hotspots because we feel there is a fundamental experiential issue with disrupting the actual video itself,” he said.

On the revenue side, the company charges a quarter per click on outbound links and votes, and it doesn’t add fees for bandwidth, usage, set-up, or per user support, Lamb said. He added that the budgets can be preset and managed in a way that’s “similar to Google AdSense with notifications based on performance/usage” and that special license fees can be set up for certain customers.

At the moment, Multipop has more than 15 brands as customers, such as Discovery Networks, Kmart, and Alice+Olivia (a fashion brand), and it plans to add more by the end of the year.

The company was founded in 2014, and has offices in both San Francisco and New York City.