StreamAlive – a leading audience engagement platform for live sessions – announced a $1.58 million pre-seed investment from Speciale Invest, an early-stage venture capital firm focused on deep tech. And Venkat Viswanathan, founder and Chairman of LatentView Analytics, Shar Dubey, former CEO of Match Group, Foster Ventures, and other seasoned executives also participated in the round. The existing investors include three professors from MIT’s computer science department, the Neon fund, and executives and unicorn founders.
The shift from fully in-person to hybrid and remote work and the continued rise of the creator economy have spurred an increase in digital content consumption. As presenters and creators look to lead, inspire, and grow their audiences, it’s important to move people from passive observers to active participants. However, traditional streaming and video conferencing platforms were not designed with engagement, leaving audiences disconnected and dispassionate.
StreamAlive connects audiences and presenters through live and visual interactions to support the rise in participatory culture and community-driven commerce. Using the native chat function of any live stream or video conferencing platform, the audience powers these interactions, including AI-powered Q&As, polls, short-answer questions, giveaways, and more. This platform displays the results in real-time—elevating the experience for everyone without navigating away from the live session.
StreamAlive operates in the background and seamlessly integrates into many popular live streaming and presentation platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, YouTube Live, and Twitch. And the platform also connects offline and hybrid audiences via browser-based chat so that everyone can be included no matter where they are or how they are experiencing the live session. This enables presenters to meet audiences where they are, eliminating the need to download or register for any new software. The presenters can activate StreamAlive simply by dropping a meeting link into the platform chat or by downloading it from the platform’s app marketplace.
StreamAlive’s use cases are plentiful, ranging from webinars to company all-hands and town halls, to teaching and training, to live-streamed gaming and entertainment, and offline conferences and hybrid events. The platform has been adopted by teams at Nike, Persistent Systems, and Symphony AI for hybrid sessions, by organizations like the National Health Services for training medical staff, and by creators, including viral YouTuber Airrack.
The StreamAlive team has its eyes set on growth with ambitions to expand this year rapidly. And the company plans to deploy the capital to grow the sales and development teams, refine the user experience for early adopters, and broaden its usability to include more platforms and use cases.
KEY QUOTES:
“Acknowledging and recognizing people is one of the most powerful and effective ways to keep them happy and engaged. This is easy for small groups, but for presenters with large audiences that are in-person, online or a mix, the ability to interact with every individual is hampered by time and technology. We created StreamAlive to overcome this obstacle and empower presenters and creators to ensure every participant—no matter where they are—has a voice that is heard and seen. Plus, it struck us that presentation tech has seen no real innovation since the mid-80s when PowerPoint was invented.”
– CEO Lux Narayan
“StreamAlive has been a game-changer in my approach to fostering inclusive participation. By leveraging the chat, StreamAlive effectively bridges the engagement gap between introverted and extroverted individuals. I have harnessed its capabilities to enhance our lecture interactions, ensuring that every participant feels integrated and valued. In the context of a classroom, this includes those who are too shy to speak up and those who are too cool to speak up. It also enables me to run through the cumulated questions at the end of the session, to ensure no query has been ignored. Since I don’t discourage smart-aleck comments, StreamAlive provides a channel to creativity of the disruptive types, without disrupting the class, and gives me a real-time feel of the mood in the class.”
– Manish Agarwal, infrastructure expert and former partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG
“The StreamAlive team has identified a space that is ripe for innovation. Audience engagement is becoming a priority for creators eager to maximize the buying power of connected communities and for organizations embracing hybrid work for the long term. StreamAlive has built a solution that drives audience interaction naturally and frictionlessly—it is incredibly sticky.”
– Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale
