Toch raises pre-Series A funding from Hyderabad Angels, Mumbai Angels and HNIs

Vogueme Technologies, which owns and operates interactive video platform Toch, has raised an undisclosed sum in a pre-Series A funding round that has been led by a clutch of investors, including, Hyderabad Angels, Mumbai Angels and other high net-worth individuals.
Proceeds from the round will be used by the Mumbai-based company to further build its technology platform, scale its team and operations, the company said in a prepared statement.
“While the platform is gearing up for a rebranded launch in the live commerce category before the end of the third quarter. The current round will be used to grow our market traction,” Vinayak Shrivastav, chief executive of Toch, said.
The three-year-old startup is an artificial intelligence-based video platform which claims to auto-detect objects, persons, emotions, locations, scenes and activities in real time, inside any video content, thereby enabling monetisation.
Toch’s technology detects touch points, extracts meta-data to enrich content data points, and automates the meta-tagging process, the company-issued statement said. Meta-tagging has been defined as a coding statement in the hypertext markup language that describes the contents of a Web page.
“Toch’s technology is already powering leading media companies in the digital media revolution that the country is currently witnessing, and the technology can be further leveraged across other sectors for a significant consumer play,” Mihir Modi, former finance head at Zee Entertainment, said.
Founded in 2016 by Shrivastav, Alok Patil and Saket Dandotia, the startup assists businesses to engage with their users, in the process, bidding to bridge the gap between content and commerce, through ad sales, product sales, brands and advertisers.
“We have automated the decade-old meta-tagging opportunity and look to keep growing our tech capabilities. Toch is currently enabling meta-tagging for live sporting events, live shows and library-based content for streaming platforms, and is venturing into broadcasting meta-tagging simultaneously,” Patil, chief technology officer at Toch, said.
“Toch has built a sector-agnostic solution which supports the rapid growth in video AI. We see technology continuing to shape the future of media and a strong space for investment which will enable us to take part in this modern shopping era that is driven by visuals,” Nandini Mansinghka, chief executive at MA Network, said.