Rembrand raises $8m seed round to scale AI product placement for video

Rembrand, the revolutionary AI product placement platform that embeds photo-realistic products into digital videos, announced a $8 million seed round and the upcoming launch of their beta platform.

The round was led by venture capital firms and strategic funds, including Greycroft and UTA.VC. Rembrand enables creators to effortlessly incorporate sponsored products into their videos, thereby reducing costs, speeding up production timelines, and increasing monetization opportunities. The beta platform opened up on February 6, 2023 with leading influencers already onboard.

Rembrand envisions a future where digital video monetization is non-intrusive to the consumer. Currently, the product placement industry is worth $23 billion and is native to movies and television, often done manually with a character using the brand's vehicle, attire, beverage, etc. Rembrand uses AI to automate the placement of high-quality virtual products into video assets, not only for movies and television, but also for the universe of online creators that dominate today's consumer viewing habits. With Rembrand, any video asset can be seamlessly enhanced with AI generated products that match the scene. This allows viewers to enjoy uninterrupted videos, while brands have the opportunity to be part of the story rather than an interruption.

According to CEO Omar Tawakol, who was previously the founder and CEO of Bluekai (a marketing data platform acquired by Oracle in 2014) and also the founder and CEO of Voicea (a conversational AI company acquired by Cisco in 2019), "Consumers are skipping ads at an alarming rate. IPG reports that up to 65% of commercials are skipped. Consumers don't like interruptions, and advertisers are searching for a more effective way to get noticed in video. With the explosive growth of online video and streaming, the traditional model of selling advertising in video is ripe for disruption."

"Product placement is a fantastic way to break through the clutter and get your brand in front of consumers, but it's a manual process that requires big budgets. We see an opportunity to enable scalable, post-production product placement that meets the needs of today's creators," says Tawakol.

Rembrand is launching it's beta with a number of leading influencers.  "Content creators move quickly and it's about time that sponsors catch up. Currently it can take weeks and multiple back-and-forths for just one sponsored integration to be approved," said Alexandra Botez of BotezLive, a leading YouTuber and Twitch influencer focused on chess. "Rembrand will help drastically speed up this process on top of providing new monetization opportunities. I can't wait to try it out!".

Rembrand plans to use the seed funding to support its beta launch. On February 7, they will begin accepting applications from elite creators who are eager to take their content monetization to the next level with Rembrand's AI technology.

Dana Settle, Co-founder and Co-managing Partner, Greycroft: "We believe Rembrand has the tech and team in place to quickly address a significant gap in the product placement marketplace with a solution geared toward content creators and streaming platforms. Omar and his founding team have a track record of success to build what we envision is a category-defining company."

The founding team at Rembrand has deep product, technical, and operational experience, having built numerous companies in the advertising and artificial intelligence domain. 

• David Wiener, Chief Product Officer at Voicea and GM for Artificial Intelligence at Cisco.
• Nikki Heyder, Director of Product from Vidcast at Cisco
• Ahmed Saad founder at Amazon Prime, Virtual Product Placement.
• Abdelrahman Mohamed, Director of AI at Meta.  

www.rembrand.com