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In 2018, we saw an upsurge in the video wave with brands exploring formats like social commerce, video commerce or live commerce to increase customer base.

With several brands fighting for consumer mindshare alongside plenty of competition, it was a win-win situation for customers, who were spoilt for choice with offerings. But, while the upsurge in video saw consumption increasing, attention span and brand impact was on the decline.

The founders of Hyperstate, a startup that builds products to help accelerate user engagement, did a deep dive into the whole ecosystem to understand such inherent problems. 

“The filters were how brands approach videos, what they need videos to solve, and what they want them to deliver. We realised that we could build a key that would unlock millions and billions of videos to connect them in the brand metaverse,” says Prashanto Das, Founder of Hyperstate.

Founded in September 2018 by Prashanto, Shubham Chauhan, Arun Anant and Sriharsha Gangisetty, Hyperstate is reimagining the future and building global SaaS platforms. It’s award-winning, patented, flagship product, Kappa, is helping brands build their video metaverse by turning their ordinary linear videos into dazzling experiences that keep users engaged, from first use to the last. 

“Brands can now add action to videos, with minimal time and effort. Kappa maps human intent and collapses the AIDA (Attention-Interest-Desire-Action) funnel. It unlocks a new kind of user behaviour- driven by choice, to deliver an in-video granular data that has never been seen or mapped before,” claims Shubham.

Converting consumers to customers instantly

Explaining the video metaverse, Prashanto says, “What if you could watch the video, choose your character or story and watch it from that perspective? What if your audiences could not only dive in and immerse themselves in your brand but also manifest their choices by interacting with your characters? Imagine, if they could now convert conversations in the digital world into real orders in the physical world – and all of this playing out in real time.” 

“Digital commerce can now be driven by humanisation and not just digitisation. Selfie-videos shot on mobiles can be turned into humanised bots that meet and greet. This small change itself has the potential to turn websites into digital stores where owners and sales teams meet and greet every visitor just like you would in a physical store,” adds Shubham.

The Pune-based startup launched its B2B2C SaaS product Kappa as an internal tool in July 2020 that companies used until Dec 2021. Post Dec 2021, it went to market as a SaaS product. It is India’s first no-code SaaS platform powering customer experience, claim the founders.

“Kappa is a brand-new product that is finding fast adoption. Currently unmatched, it has wide applications across categories and industries, giving it horizontal scale and a deep tail,” highlights Prashanto.

What does Kappa solve for?

According to the founders, Kappa empowers every team, from publishers to marketers to business owners to create stunning experiences that drive measurable impact. The no-code SaaS platform helps brands make better, more engaging stories, helps their consumers make the best possible choices in the shortest possible time.

Speaking of use-cases and its functionality, Shubham states, the tool transforms ordinary media assets into interactive experiences, is a multiplayer by nature, allows for fast creation and iteration saving time, and ensures every message and every communication delivers ROI. Besides, the no-code tool also helps break the silos between teams as everyone can come together and work off the same project at the same time.

In a tremendous boost to the team, the product won three awards at the 14th edition of IDMA 2021 ( Indian Digital Marketing Awards) held in July 2021. 

The founding team

Before Kappa, all the four founders knew each other and wanted to work together in the tech space in the future. Arun and Prashanto worked together at UTV/Disney, while Shubham and Sriharsha have been together since college. 

After meeting at a hackathon a few years back, Prashanto and Shubham started working on a voice experience platform, and realised that it didn’t have mass scalability and didn’t make much sense for the end consumer. 

After interacting with over 700 companies, the duo decided they wanted to work within the virtual and video experience. Arun and Sriharsha joined them in their journey to building Kappa.

With a team size of 12 members, Prashanto leads business operations, Shubham leads product and tech, Arun is involved in business planning, organisation design, recruitment, market entry strategies, and environmental scanning, and Harsha leads product development to build the Hyperstate ecosystem.

Business model and revenue

Kappa can be bought either on a subscription basis or on a one-time usage basis. The platform

is commercially structured around a workspace where teams can subscribe to a workspace to build their own video metaverse. For different audience sizes and feature needs, they have a combination of tiers (starter, growth & premium) and usage that fulfil the demand of product. Users can signup and start with the free tier and upgrade to plans starting  with as low as $100.

 “We are currently clocking about $200K for FY22 and with the platform opening up, we believe we can achieve $20M in ARR in the next three to four years,” claims Prashanto.

With over 10 paying customers in BFSI, automobile, retail and consumer electronics, Kappa is in talk with 200+ customers. Some of its prominent clients include Canon, Standard Chartered, Mercedes Benz, Merkle Sokrati etc.

Market opportunity and way forward

The no-code development platform market is pegged at $17.2 billion as of 2021 and is forecasted to reach $45.5B by 2025, according to a report by Markets and Markets on Low-Code Development Platform Market.

With its current focus on content driven customer experiences and humanizing interactions, Prashanto says Kappa is eyeing a large chunk of this market. 

“We see our platform being the default for going to the market and engaging with the customers. With the metaverse space maturing, we see Kappa scaling across industries and sectors setting new benchmarks of immersive experiences,” he adds.

On funding, Prashanto explains, “We presented an early prototype at the Nasscom Product Conclave in December 2019. We got some interest, and also realised that waiting to raise capital would have cost us time.”

“At the time, we thought it was more prudent to back the idea with our own significant investment of blood, sweat, tears and money. As covid wrecked its havoc, now when we look back, this was one of the best decisions we made. More so as we see the trend of actionable, no-code, programmable videos and immersive interfaces now picking up in our largest market -the US. With the larger product-build getting over and the business starting to deliver and getting considerably de-risked, we believe it is a good time to get in the right partners to scale and grow,” remarks Prashanto.

Currently, the startup is in talks to raise capital to scale R&D, and augment marketing and sales operations across geographies.

While Kappa doesn’t have any direct competition, Prashanto says, “We may have competition across the different segments that we serve. There are no-code platforms like Webflow and Bubble that aid web and app development,” he concludes.