Finnish video AI startup raises $2m
The investment will help Valossa expand its product team and its global sales and marketing of it artificial intelligence (AI) video products.
According to the Cisco Global Video Index, by 2021, 82% of all consumer Internet traffic will be video. Valossa recently released its first commercial product, Valossa AI, as a cloud service that detects and identifies people, visual and audio context, spoken topics, themed video categories and explicit content from large volumes of video data.
Valossa AI analyses videos at a high speed and produces detailed descriptions for every second of the video. The Core recognition engine is available on a customer’s premises, as an API or as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Th ecompany is completing several pilots and trials with its AI-based products for corporations and enterprises that own and use volumes of video. The technology was developed and patented at the University of Oulu in northern Finland, and the company is based n the city.
A deep video search feature will enable customers to gain scene-level understanding of their video content and make it easily searchable. Valossa believes its video intelligence and search features, will become standardized throughout the industry as video-based companies seek greater monetization around content using intelligent discovery features.
“We are now at a tipping point for AI’s utility in the video industry, and we feel that Valossa AI can readily serve the needs of all stakeholders in the industry, from OTT providers to broadcasters to on-demand providers,” said Mika Rautiainen, co-founder and CEO of Valossa.
The round was led by London-based 01 Ventures, followed by Finland-based Reaktor Ventures, the strategic investment arm of renowned software development and design firm Reaktor, and Finnish venture capital firm Butterfly Ventures. Jari Ovaskainen, a noted Finnish business angel investor best known for his investments in Finnish mobile game developers Supercell, Next Games, and PlayRaven, has also invested in Valossa. Eeswaran Navaratnam, from 01 Ventures, and Ville Heikkinen, from Butterfly Ventures, will join the board of directors of Valossa.
“The market opportunity for AI in the video industry is huge, and Valossa are already among the clear leaders in this emerging space,” said Eeswaran Navaratnam, partner with 01 Ventures. “The need for descriptive, intelligent AI features for video data is rapidly growing, and Valossa has already been at the forefront of advanced video AI for the past few years. Their technology understands video in the same way a human does, moving well beyond simple descriptions of scenes. This takes the field of video AI and Machine Vision technology a big step forward, while unlocking a whole new set of commercial uses for customers that has never been possible – until now.”
Related stories:
- AI-POWERED SOFTWARE BOOSTS FACIAL CLASSIFICATION FOR VIDEO LAW ENFORCEMENT
- GRAPHCORE’S ‘COLOSSUS’ CHIP DUE BEFORE END OF YEAR
- SECOND GENERATION JETSON BOARD TAKES AI TO THE EDGE
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
