AI-generated video tutorials now employer’s best friend – with Guidde

The next step in visual guide development, says startup's CEO Yoav Einav, is personalization

Here’s one more business application for generative AI: how-to video guides to get employees up to speed on new software. It launched on the market less than a year ago by the fast-growing startup Guidde, which just celebrated raising $11.6 million in new capital.

The funding marked Guidde’s Series A round as it continues to develop and market its platform for generating video documentation – 11 times faster, as advertised. The product aims to help employees master the plethora of new software apps at workplaces and businesses save time and resources on creating manuals.

Palo Alto-based Norwest Venture Partners, an investor in Birdies and Socrates.ai, led the round. Repeat investors participated; these were Entrée Capital, with offices in Tel Aviv, London, and New York, Honeystone Ventures and Crescendo Ventures in Palo Alto. New investor Tiferes Ventures joined in.

The new capital will fund Guidde’s teams for engineering and data science, as well as grow its go-to-market staff as the company looks to expand overseas, according to company statement. To date, Guidde has raised $15.6 million.

Creating a how-to guide with Guidde seems very simple. Using the guidde browser extension for Chrome, an employee can record the workflow as he or she is going through the actions to be shown in the tutorial. Guidde’s platform then generates a step-by-step description of the workflow with AI-made voiceover, now offered in 100 different voices and languages. It will also set up the design for your video, no designer required, and include motion and interactivity.

As the company said in a statement, its extension allows “anyone in an organization can create, edit, publish, and analyze video and documentation in less time that it takes to make a cup of coffee.”

Co-founder and CEO Yoav Einav dubbed Guidde the “Waze for software,” drawing a parallel between navigating the streets and understanding software. Lots of sources out there support video-based learning, claiming videos grab attention and increase engagement better than other training materials, and that was the end product that Guidde focuses on to realize its technology.

“Our primary goal is to empower SaaS companies to boost engagement, as we recognize that engagement is a pivotal factor for both conversion and retention,” Einav told Vator in writing. “We want to enable each user to achieve their unique goals within an application, tailoring a personalized journey based on their individual needs and interactions.”

This idea of personalization proved successful in B2C applications, Einav added, naming Netflix and TikTok as top examples. “In essence, we're focused on bringing the best practices and personalization techniques from the consumer space to the B2B realm, providing a more tailored and engaging experience for software users. This strategic direction will shape the future of Guidde and enhance its value proposition in the market,” he said.

Going into some technical details of the works, Guidde uses a combination of its AI models and GPT models. For security purposes, the model is trained via the so-called “few-shot prompting” in-context technique rather than based on customer-specific data.

“To generate all the video building blocks using AI, such as storyline, background music, motion, and more, we’re extracting the context which helps the AI model understand the semantics and relationships between flows and users,” Einav said.

He added that Guidde has built one of the largest datasets for software workflows leveraging its freemium tier. This dataset spans more than 5,000 software applications including AWS, Salesforce, Gong, Imperva, Hubspot, and Outreach.

The pricing for the service is currently set at $35 per user per month – and Guidde is growing fast. The company told TechCrunch earlier that it saw revenue surge 500% from a year ago.

Guidde has locations in Belmont, CA, and Israel. Founded in 2020 by Einav and Dan Sahar, the company launched its product less than a year ago, and has since attracted a slew of brands, big and small – close to 500, in fact. These include cybersecurity companies like Check Point and SentinelOne, Swedish circuit board maker PCB Connect, AI transcription solution Verbit, healthcare data protection company Cynerio, online pay platform Payoneer, and entertainment company LiveNation.

 Images used in part from: Guidde, Rawpixel