An an Educational Venture Analyst, I do not recommend investing in Annoto in 2022. Instead, I would suggest potential investors watch the company for increased growth and evidence of a concerted effort by the company to place their stake in the all-consuming online video market.
It is true that Annoto offers a unique value proposition to the online education market and other areas of web development. Annoto has been designed with user experience in mind: Its' features offer a clear benefit to those institutions with the capacity to implement this tool in their online space. For portiential buyers, Annoto proposes to increase user collaboration and engagement, all the while reducing staff time in the creation of learning activities and production of assessment data.
Though while Annoto offers an innovative product, their growth is stiffled by their currrent startup marketing strategy, which finds the product swallowed up in the sheer size of the global online video market. There are some similar tools out there that offer authoring tools for engagement or collaboration. Similarly, many educators may opt to create activities with video prompt directly in their LMS which reduces the need for an external plugin. So while Annoto has staked out an innovative corner of the market, the product does meet a need that cannot be approached with different (potentially cheaper) solutions. From the perspective of a small to mid-sized company: Why spend additional money for this product when you can create a collaborative activity with the video simply embedded beside it?
Before investing in this product, I would want to see a better marketing strategy. Their business model consists currently of charging high prices to larger institutions without any real scalable options for smaller insitutions. Depending on a small number of large businesses has left their brand recorgnition fairly low. It is also difficult to find information on certain functionalities without discussing without the developers directly. With the relatively low visibility of their marketing approach, Annoto is depending on slow, steady growth, based on their growing customer base. This is a generally is a safe approach, but lackluster to investors who want to see a strategy for large-scale expansion.
We can expect steady growth as more large insitutions begin using this tool, but until there are scalable payment options, small to mid-sized companies will be priced out of using this tool. Annoto should be promoting their market viability by encouraging potential customers to see the appeal of this app and offering scalable purchasing options to widen their pool of potential customers.
As an educator, I love the tool and would recommend it to institutions with the resources to implement it on their platform. Nevertheless, as an investor I would not recommend investing in Annoto until the next phase of their expansion strategy becomes clear.