Veritone Secures Up To $50M In Funding Based On Milestones

Veritone, a cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI) media technology company, said it has signed an agreement with Acacia Research, a patent investment group, for up to $50 million in funding.

The funding is structured as an initial $20 million convertible investment, with a contingent additional investment of $30 million based on set milestones. The company plans to use the capital to expand globally -- supporting AI analytics, search and predictive solution for media firms, corporate enterprise, political campaigns and government. 

Louis Graziadio, executive chairman of Acacia, joined the board of directors as part of the partnership. 

Veritone’s AI platform renders every second and frame of audio and video content searchable for objects, faces, license plates, logos, phrases, sentiment, voice identification, translation plus additional capabilities that are constantly evolving. It also located and identifies organic media and segments the data in a specific period of time.

Veritone President Ryan Steelberg and his brother Chad -- who is Veritone's CEO and a former Google executive -- run the company and oversee the production of the platform, which produces an index from ingested data within five minutes of receiving the content.

Back in September 2015 it took in about several thousand hours daily, Ryan Steelberg said. It enables the brand to identify when a specific word or image is used during a broadcast and at what time. The user can analyze the sentiment and tone of the audio, along with specific markets.

Veritone had its breakthrough year in 2015, when it closed deals with Maker studios to accelerate native advertising campaigns. The partnership provides Veritone Media advertisers with access to Maker’s creator base, providing them with a way to easily activate channels that are available for in-content product mentions and integrations at scale.

The company also announced that Microsoft began implementing Azure Media Services Indexer into Veritone’s Cognitive Media Platform, a collaboration aimed at delivering state-of-the-art speech recognition to its customers.

The partnership with Microsoft was about having the ability to search audio and video streams for content as easily as searching for a recipe. Veritone calls it the future of the "cognitive cloud." Aside from Microsoft, Veritone clients include ESPN Radio, Nuance, Westwood One, LegalZoom, Spark Agency, Taco Bell, Republican National Committee, and Dollar Shave Club.

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