01 Ventures, Reaktor Ventures, Butterfly Ventures, and Jari Ovaskainen Invest In Round For Leading Artificial-Intelligence (AI) Platform for Video Understanding
OULU, FINLAND – Valossa™, a video artificial intelligence (AI) company, today announced that it has completed a $2 million round of investment. The investment will help the company expand its product team and its global sales and marketing to meet the demands for its Valossa AI™ video intelligence products. 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.
According to the Cisco Global Video Index, by 2021, 82% of all consumer Internet traffic will be video. Content understanding opens up new revenue opportunities and a cost-efficiency that have been completely untapped until today. Valossa recently released its first commercial product, Valossa AI™, a cloud service that is the industry’s most comprehensive AI video recognition platform. Valossa AI watches videos at a superhuman speed and produces detailed descriptions for every second of the video. The Core recognition engine is available as an on-premise, API and SaaS platform that detects and identifies people, visual and audio context, spoken topics, themed video categories, and explicit content from large volumes of video data.
Valossa is completing several pilots and trials with its AI-based products for corporations and enterprises that own and use volumes of video in their businesses, including several Fortune Global 500 companies.
“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.”
Valossa recently announced that deep video search capabilities will be included in its online service. The 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, which were originally created for its movie discovery experience, www.whatismymovie.com, to 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. “Valossa is thrilled to have a seasoned group of investors who are committed to AI innovations in the video space, and we look forward to growing our industry footprint.”
ABOUT VALOSSA
Valossa, the deep content company founded in 2015, is a leading provider of advanced products for AI-based visual content search and recognition. The Valossa technology represents years of prime research and essential patents from the University of Oulu in northern Finland. Valossa is headquartered in Oulu, Finland, and has representation in New York. For more information, please visit the web site at www.valossa.com.