Insights

Life Inside secures funding to transform video marketing

Written by The Life Inside Team | Feb 29, 2024 12:26:37 PM

Life Inside, a SaaS company reimagining video marketing by helping businesses automate the collection and publishing of interactive video testimonials from employees and customers, announced £300,000 in funding to focus on expansion. The funding came from a group of angel investors, including Stefan Magnusson, seed investor in Evolution Gaming, Jonas Brogårdh, Sweden's former Secretary of Commerce in the UK, and Houman Ashrafzadeh, who co-founded Padium UK with Spotify founder Martin Lorentzson. The new funding will be used to enhance the interactivity of the platform, incorporate AI in its features to analyse and generate content, and to expand the company’s marketing strategy and global outreach.

Originally incubated in Oddwork in 2022, a Nordic leader in employer branding, and founded by Charles Sinclair, Poyan Karimi and Niklas Kekonius, who also were Oddwork’s co-founders, Life Inside was conceived to fill a gap in corporate storytelling. Charles, Poyan and Niklas wanted to create a platform that not only shared stories directly from clients and employees but also connected businesses and audiences on a deeper level. Today, Life Inside provides businesses of all sizes with a fully interactive platform that humanises and personalises their marketing content, allowing online audiences to actively select the topics and formats they want to engage with. The platform aims to drive increased audience engagement and conversion for recruitment, employer branding, sales and marketing workstreams. 

Since its launch two years ago, Life Inside has rapidly expanded its client base and reached cash positivity, boasting over 70 subscription-paying clients today. The company already works internationally with major companies like Specsavers, recruitment giant Adecco, American clinical research company Parexel, Swedish telecom company Telia and Sweden's second biggest food retailer Axfood. Life Inside was voted SaaS-Newcomer of the Year finalist in 2022 and 2023 at the largest SaaS event in the Nordics, Breakit SaaS Summit.

“In recruitment, the number one obstacle candidates experience when searching for a job is not knowing what it’s like to work at an organisation. In sales and marketing, 95% of B2B buyers say video plays an important role in moving forward with a purchase. But when we started looking, we found no way to effortlessly collect and distribute interactive video testimonials from customers and employees. We built Life Inside to allow companies to change that, and help them capture genuinely interesting and human stories with minimal cost, to truly showcase the essence of their service and culture. To make the online experience as personal and engaging as face-to-face meetings – but scalable," said Charles Sinclair, Head of Partnerships and co-founder of Life Inside. 

Houman Ashrafzadeh, Padium’s co-founder and an angel investor in the round, said: “Imagine a situation where every visitor to your website is guided by interactive video testimonials. They’re not just watching videos, they’re engaging with real stories, choosing the paths that resonate with them personally when navigating them.
For potential employees or customers, it means they can experience the company in totally new ways, feeling a connection that static text or images could never create. Life Inside humanises marketing: it helps companies become online living entities where each click leads to a deeper, more meaningful understanding of what it means to be part of their organisation - and I couldn’t be prouder to back them.”

Life Inside is leveraging the trend of fast-growing demand from businesses to create high quality video flexibly, and operates at the juncture of the global Application Tracking System market, expected to grow to $2billion by 2027, and the chatbot market, potentially reaching $32.4billion by 2032. The platform stands out from competitors by offering a seamless integration experience and interactive capabilities that go beyond simple video testimonials. With GDPR compliance at its core, it also meets high security and privacy standards.