StreamAlive picks up $1.58M to build engagement tools for livestreams

StreamAlive, an audience engagement application for livestreams, virtual meetings and in-person events, secured $1.58 million in pre-seed funding, the company announced today.

From webinars, livestreamed town halls and virtual work meetings to Twitch streams, online classes and in-person conferences, there are plenty of instances when audience engagement tools are beneficial. They not only allow presenters to track engagement and manage comments, but they also help audience members feel included and heard.

StreamAlive integrates into popular video conferencing and livestream platforms via the chat function. (No code, links or embeds are needed.) For in-person events, users can scan a QR code and participate in a browser-based chat on their phones. StreamAlive works with popular platforms Zoom, Google Meet, Teams, YouTube Live, LinkedIn Live and Twitch. The company plans to add support for more platforms in the future.

Audience members participate in interactive games — or “chat-powered” features as StreamAlive calls them — where their answers appear on the main screen. There are 10 features currently available, including AI-powered Q&As, polls, giveaways and more. For instance, “Winning Wheel” picks winners via a randomizer spinning wheel, “Magic Maps” visualizes where participants are streaming from across the world and “Wonder Words” involves a presenter asking a question and the responses appear as a word collage. The platform can automatically detect when a question is asked in the chat. Plus, an engagement level meter can be found at the bottom left corner of the screen.

At the end of each session, presenters get a list of active participants, which tells them how often they participated, as well as a chart to track the highs and lows of an entire session to see where people were the most or least engaged.

Anyone can make an account for free, however, users can also pay for a subscription to unlock upgrades like unlimited chat-powered interactions and a live training session with StreamAlive’s team, along with more AI-based tools, including using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas on how to interact with audiences. There are three plans to choose from: Basic ($19/month), Pro ($39/month) and Pro+ ($99/month).

The company is also working on bringing “fully AI-generated presentations,” a chat-powered interaction that “clusters similar questions together” and a new way to “automatically visualize data,” among other upcoming features, co-founder Lux Narayan tells TechCrunch.

“[For example] if a presenter asks the audience how comfortable on a scale of 1-5 they are with public speaking, once everyone enters their answer in chat, it will automatically average out the data and present that visually so everyone can see the audience’s average comfort level of public speaking,” he adds.

The concept of going to an office five days a week is more or less dead, and many people agree that hybrid work (in-person and remote) is here to stay. StreamAlive believes it’s more important than ever that employers prevent workers from feeling disconnected when working from home, and the company believes its platform is part of the solution.

“Most companies are not going to return to fully in-person. Yet, during all-hands meetings or training or presentations, companies need to ensure there is parity between people who are in-person and others who are joining remotely. This means that everyone has the ability to be heard and acknowledged and that enthusiasm and morale don’t drop off when someone is working remotely,” says Narayan.

Similarly, when gaming streamers and educators include interactions in their livestreams, it could help convert more passive observers into active participants and, in turn, boost their fanbases or make a lengthy online course more entertaining.

The idea for StreamAlive came about when Narayan was taking online courses to learn how to write, edit and market his book, “Name, Place, Animal, Thing.” He noticed how a lot of the audience’s responses were being ignored in the chat and event hosts struggled to boost, convert and track engagement. StreamAlive became widely available in December 2022 and currently has more than 2,000 users, including teams at Nike, Symphony AI and Persistent Systems. Notably, YouTuber Airrack implemented StreamAlive into his viral three-hour live ping pong competition, using it to track over 365,000 comments.

Narayan and his co-founders, Joe Varghese and Tina Lyngdoh, were also part of the founding team at Unmetric, the social media intelligence platform acquired by Cision in 2019.

The recent round was led by Speciale Invest, with participation from Foster Ventures, former CEO of Match Group Shar Dubey and founder and Chairman of LatentView Analytics Venkat Viswanathan, among others. The company plans to put the new capital toward product development and expanding the engineering and growth teams.

In January 2022, StreamAlive raised $1.53 million in a separate pre-seed funding round, which was also backed by Speciale Invest and included angel investors like “three world-renowned computer science professors at MIT, two CEOs at public companies [and] four CXOs at private tech unicorns,” the company said.