With $2.1 Million In Funding, Fuisz Media Brings Interactivity To Video At Scale

For the past two years, Fuisz Media has been quietly developing the technology necessary to quickly and easily add interactive elements to video. Now, it’s coming out of stealth mode, with more than $2 million in funding and some interesting enterprise clients.

Fuisz Media uses computer vision to identify specific items and create differentiated experiences around them. By tagging those items, brands, advertisers, and publishers can provide in-video opportunity for viewers to learn more about products.

The technology was built to overlay videos distributed through multiple different platforms, and to work with a number of different ad servers. Fuisz’s interactive videos can also be displayed on a number of different devices, including desktop, mobile phones, and tablets.

According to co-founder and CEO Justin Fuisz, the company is able to provide a high rate of accuracy in identifying and tracking items frame-by-frame. “In computer vision, if you’re getting a 70-80 percent accuracy rate, you’re high-fiving,” Fuisz said. “But if Coca-Cola is paying you, that’s not good enough.”

(As a side note, Fuisz’s father Richard led a pretty crazy life.)

Anyway, Fuisz Media is showing impressive unheard-of clickthrough rates, on the order of 20 percent or higher on some campaigns.

As a result, Fuisz has managed to sign up clients like Nike, Target, and Walmart to offer up interactive videos. By doing so, those customers can enable consumers to hover over and click on specific products in videos to get more information about them, share on social networks, or even to purchase items online.

The company has raised $2.1 million in seed funding that was led by Metamorphic Ventures and Lerer Hippeau Ventures. Other investors include Science Inc., Buddy Media founder Michael Lazerow, LegalZoom founder Brian Lee, Roku CMO Matthew Anderson, AdMeld founder Ben Barokas, WGI Group, the United Talent Agency, and Mesa+.