Kiosked Success Story: "Maybe it's a Finnish thing not to talk about a $6.9 million funding round"

Micke Paqvalén is the founder and CEO of Kiosked

Micke Paqvalén is the founder and CEO of Kiosked, who took part in the first CODE_n competition. Micke is a serial entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience from international business.

When CODE_n was organized for the first time in 2012, we applied with Kiosked and won one of the desired TOP 50 placements. As the founder of Kiosked I am more than proud to announce that in the past two years and especially in the recent months Kiosked has had great news to spread.

Kiosked was founded in 2010 with just a handful employees and has since then rapidly grown to over 70 people in three different continents. In addition to their headquarter in Espoo, Finland the company has recently established offices in London, New York, Los Angeles and Singapore. Personally I am amazed by the great people we have hired.

However hiring great people costs money and therefore I am grateful for two funding rounds we have accomplished so far. The first one in June 2012 was led by Kaj Hed, majority owner of Rovio. The second funding round in October 2013 of $6.9 million were also big news for us. This second funding round was led by Kevin Wall of Craton Equity Partners, who also joined Kiosked’s board of directors, and John Lindfors, Partner at Digital Sky Technologies.

As said finding funding to finance a growing company is one thing but finding stars to recruit is a whole different story. Our team has over the past few years shown to be a strong asset of Kiosked, the secret sauce so to speak. I am truly proud that we have more than doubled in size within just one year and managed to recruit a great team.

We have been keeping a bit quiet about what we are up to. Maybe it’s a Finnish thing, just thinking of Kimi Räikkönen who is famous for his sparse communication. However, starting from our recent funding round of $6.9 million in October this year, this has come to a stop. We started releasing one after the other all the products we have been working on in the past years. It is pretty simple, if we don’t communicate we don’t exist. It is also time to send Kiosked out to the world.

One of Kiosked’s recent releases is our dynamic video solution. Kevin Spacey stated at the Edinburgh Television Festival “Give people what they want, when they want it in the form they want it”. We make exactly this happen now. Kiosked is known for bringing interactive elements, kiosks, to any image. These kiosks can either contain products and purchase information or offer other forms of engagement.

Now we have taken our technology one logical step forward: Kiosked Video allows publishers and advertisers to turn any video into a shoppable and viral storefront. Brands can kiosk their branded content and engage with their fans, and publishers can monetize the video content they share. We have build our video solution in such a way that it works regardless of the player. This makes us the first company to offer interactive, player agnostic videos. Usually companies who want to make their videos interactive are bound to a certain video-player that is provided by a specific interactive video service.

Kiosked basically democratizes video-marketing and makes it possible for anyone to use interactive elements on their videos. This creates new revenue streams and ways to engage with consumers. The best part is that these videos can be already shared in preferred social media networks.  You can try it out yourself and just hover over the top left corner in the video below and discover how well Kiosked works within twitter.

My vision for the future is that all content that we share online, videos, images no matter in which social network we share it becomes rich and engaging for consumers. This is what I want to achieve with with Kiosked.