AsiaIndustrial NetNews: In this wave of artificial intelligence boom, senior practitioners are still admonishing entrepreneurs, “Only doing technology but not providing commercial value will eventually lead to a dead end.” And now, there is already an artificial intelligence startup that has opened the way to go public. On March 15, Veritone formally submitted an IPO prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), planning to raise $15 million. If the IPO goes well, it will be the first AI company listed in the United States in this AI wave.
What does Veritone do? The upcoming company doesn’t seem to be well known.
“Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing media discovery and analysis, now every frame in video, every second in audio can be used to search for objects, faces, sounds, brands, emotions, text and more. This revolution Changes the rules by which we view multimedia content, enabling highly content-sensitive decision makers, such as advertising, politics, law and public safety, to use applications and insights to improve business.”
On Veritone’s official website, there is a passage with the theme “Unlocking the Next Generation of Artificial Intelligence”. According to Lei Feng.com, this is a cognitive computing capability based on artificial intelligence, which can process, convert and analyze unstructured audio and video data, and automatically generate feasible intelligence to assist business decision-making. company.
Veritone introduced that its AI system includes more than 40 different types and levels of cognitive engines such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, HP and Nuance, which can capture and extract data from unstructured multimedia content, and its cognitive Capabilities include speech transcription, face recognition, object recognition, audio and video fingerprinting, sentiment analysis, translation, geolocation, optical character recognition, metadata extraction and media format transcoding, etc. A searchable, time-sorted database enables users to analyze this information at any time.
(Veritone can transcribe video content into text and provide translation)
Veritone’s products have a variety of usage scenarios, such as advertising, politics, law and public safety. For example, Veritone’s platform can analyze audio and video of past court cases, perform near real-time simultaneous playback, automatic transcription and translation of the latter, allowing you to judge for yourself what is relevant to your case. And, according to Veritone, it can index this disparate data in minutes, which in 2015 could have taken thousands of hours.
However, Lei Feng.com learned that advertising is currently Veritone’s most important business. Its prospectus shows that its revenue in 2016 was 8.91 million US dollars, and the profit margin was as high as 80%. However, the vast majority of Veritone’s revenue came from the advertising agency business.
(Photo from: US Stock Investment Network)
Veritone also has a lot of experience in making advertising more efficient and smarter. It can track the mention, appearance and physical Display of the brand in all media to conduct more accurate advertising effect measurement and gap analysis with competitors; Similarly, this tool can also be applied to TV, radio and other media to analyze and monitor their media services; in sports competitions, event organizers and professional sports teams can also use Veritone to maximize audience arrivals, maintain Fan relations, so that sponsors get better returns.
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From the founder’s professional experience, we can understand why Veritone focuses on advertising.
Veritone founders Chad Steelberg and Ryan Steelberg are twin brothers. In 1995, the two co-founded and was acquired by Internet investment company CMGI in 2000; in 1998, they jointly founded Internet advertising sales company 2CAN Media, which was later acquired by CMGI again. Acquisitions; in 2002, they founded a third advertising agency, dMarc Broadcasting, which was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.2 billion. The two also joined Google as general managers of Google’s Audio Division and Radio Division, respectively.
Veritone was founded in 2014 and is another entrepreneurial project of Chad Steelberg and Ryan Steelberg. In addition to the artificial intelligence platform they emphasized, Veritone also has a subsidiary called Veritone One, which provides traditional advertising agency business.
Veritone’s vision is to build a cloud-based cognitive system that integrates multiple cognitive engines, open to media and advertising agencies in the form of SaaS. However, investment institutions assess Veritone that although it helped advertisers put more than $75 million in media advertising in 2016, and its main customers include large companies such as Uber, DraftKings, Amazon, etc., all the company’s revenue comes from media customers. For its advertising contracts, the AI platform is still in the early stages of research and development, and its expanded SaaS licensing business is no guarantee of success.
Therefore, at present, this “first share of artificial intelligence” is mainly an advertising company, and it still has a long way to go for startups to mine commercial value for artificial intelligence.
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