Your Brand Is Being Talked About on TikTok. You Have No Idea.

01 /The Concept

As Dig correctly observed, we now live in a world where information spreads primarily in video format – Stories, Reels, TikToks, YouTube shorts, and everywhere else. Which means brands need a way to monitor what's being said about them in video, in real time, so they can respond before small signals become large problems. That's what Dig built: a "social video intelligence" platform.

Dig's AI engine continuously scans large volumes of video content appearing across social networks. It can visually identify products that appear on screen, analyze the topic of each video, extract sentiment (positive and negative) along with the specific reasons behind it, and map the demographic profile of each video's audience.

This is especially critical when something dangerous to a brand surfaces – clear negative coverage, misinformation, or leaked confidential information. In those cases, Dig sends an automated alert complete with recommended next steps: for example, which platform to contact and on what grounds to request a takedown.

But alerts are just the starting point. Dig structures all collected data into ongoing reports that track shifts in brand health metrics – the ratio of positive to negative sentiment, the most frequent product complaints, trend lines over time. Brands can also benchmark these metrics against their main competitors, as well as newcomers moving aggressively into their space.

Dig didn't stop at standard reports. Everything the AI collects is stored in an internal database, which means teams can query it in plain language – asking whatever they want about their own brand or a competitor's, and getting answers grounded in actual video content.

Dig recently announced a new $14M funding round, adding to the $8M it raised two years ago.

02 /Why It Matters

What Dig gets right is the underlying shift: video really is eating the internet. Monitoring brand reputation or competitive intelligence using text-based tools – even sophisticated ones – means working from an increasingly small and lagging slice of available information.

Alongside that, a growing share of people find it easier to record a short video or send a voice message than to type. This shift was spotted by Hark ([related review](/review/uluchshat-nuzhno-otsjuda)), which raised $5M for a platform that lets customers submit support requests as video or voice messages, analyzing and converting them into structured tickets using pattern-recognition logic similar to Dig's.

The third piece is perhaps the most significant: the vast majority of people with an opinion about a brand never contact its support team. They record a video and post it to TikTok, Reels, or wherever their audience is.

Syncly ([covered here](/review/prodat-takoe-v-2-raza-proshhe)) built around this insight – graduating from Y Combinator in 2023 and raising $3.8M for a platform that analyzes inbound support messages to surface the root causes of customer dissatisfaction. It recently announced an expansion that extends the same analysis to social posts and videos: capturing the sentiment that customers share publicly but never bring to a support channel.

What these startups are doing falls under the banner of social listening. Nichefire ([related review](/review/kak-uspet-vojti-v-novyj-trend-chtoby-pobolshe-zarabotat)) raised $2.6M for a related but distinct approach: culture listening. Rather than monitoring brand mentions, the platform tracks emerging topics and conversations – giving brands early signals about trends they could build into, before those trends peak and become obvious to everyone.

03 /Opportunities

Since video is becoming the dominant format on the internet, the general direction is clear: rebuild existing analytical tools for video rather than text.

Dig fits cleanly into this pattern – it's a reinvention of "online reputation monitoring" using modern video analysis instead of keyword scraping. The broader principle extends across many categories. A few examples beyond Hark:

Reelist ([related review](/review/novye-privychki-molodjozhi-jeto-shans-vzletet)) raised $3.3M – $3M of it in a round two weeks ago – for a platform that lets companies post short recruiting videos instead of traditional job listings.

Dexa ([related review](/review/kak-konkurirovat-s-chatgpt)) raised $6M in its first round a year ago for a search engine specifically for video podcasts – so users can find answers to specific questions within expert interviews and personal channels.

That last product taps into a familiar cognitive bias: if someone said it on video, it carries more authority than if they wrote it. The spoken word, on camera, has replaced the printed page as the trusted medium.

The underlying question for any category: what existing text-based tool could be meaningfully upgraded to a video-native version? Video captures what text misses – emotional tone, visual product context, real-time reactions – and AI is what makes that upgrade accurate enough to be commercially useful.