Vudini co-founder Daniel Kiely. Image: Kieran Harnett
The start-up co-founded by Daniel Kiely has also added some big names to its advisory board, including former Airbnb exec Aisling Hassell.
Riding on a global surge in creator content, Irish start-up Vudini has raised more than €2m in seed funding to invest in its video-ranking service.
Co-founded by entrepreneur Daniel Kiely, Vudini uses artificial intelligence to help YouTube creators and brands to reach target audiences more efficiently and monetise their content.
Its platform optimises organic search visibility and boosts users’ search ranking – which is key for creators to get discovered by their target audiences.
“The creator economy is experiencing sharp growth in the wake of the pandemic and investors are taking note,” Kiely said.
“Creators are the future of entertainment and anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit and an idea should have the proper support infrastructure to help them in following their dreams.”
Vudini said that its customer base increased by more than 300pc across four continents in Q3 of 2021.
Its clients include popular YouTube channel Little Kelly Minecraft, which has more than 3.3m followers. Altcoin Daily, another channel that focuses on crypto news, increased its subscribers by more than 850,000 and received 90m views since using Vudini.
Kiely said that the start-up opened a funding round earlier this year to help scale its tech, and has seen new customer growth in the US, Japan, India, Spain and the UK.
“The creator economy will encompass a large percentage of the workforce of the future, and we’re very much at an inflection point in time, where becoming a professional creator is proven to be one of the most desired jobs for the coming generations,” he added.
Kiely and his wife Linda Kiely previously founded outsourcing start-up Voxpro. Canadian telecoms giant Telus acquired a majority stake in the business in 2017 and completed the acquisition in 2019, when Kiely stepped down as CEO.
Last year, the couple stepped up as investors in Republic of Work, an innovation campus located in Cork, joining co-founders DC Cahalane and Dave Ronayne with a €250,000 injection.
New appointments
Vudini has also added some big names in tech to its advisory board.
Former Airbnb executive Aisling Hassell and former Google executive Fintan Gillespie, who now leads Snap’s gaming and business unit in EMEA, will advise Vudini in its efforts to identify and evaluate potential partnerships, products and technologies as it scales its offerings for creators globally.
“Today, over 80pc of all content consumed on the internet is video. However, there’s a complete lack of tools to enable content creators to focus on what they do best – make great content – and not on the complexity of search engine ranking,” Hassell said.
“That’s where Vudini steps in, by helping creators operationalise and scale their video performance and uncover new audiences. I’m excited by what this technology can do to support the growing community of online content entrepreneurs.”
Vudini was founded by Kiely, Mike English and Ricky Hill and is certified by Google and YouTube as an AI video SEO platform.
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