AI and cloud media company Newsbridge has used IBC to announce that it has raised €7 million in a Series A funding round to continue its expansion to the US and hire top AI and media engineering talent to boost its R&D in AI-based indexing for media assets. Supernova Invest leads the funding round, with continued support from VC Elaia Partners and angel investor Dominique Edelin.
Unlike traditional AI which relies on a single source for indexing, Newsbridge’s Multimodal AI merges detection results from face, text, objects, pattern and transcription to produce highly accurate metadata and search results. It automatically identifies faces, objects, logos and written text, transcribes audio and provides semantic context. “We’re always improving the quality of the kinds of scene we can detect,” explained Philippe Petitpont, Co-Founder and CEO, Newsbridge.
According to Petitpont, the funding will first allow the company to open an office in New York and hire dedicated regional managers in Europe and the Middle East. Crucially much of the R&D will be focused on making the context analysis more power efficient.
“AI uses GPUs for neural networks. That is a lot of processing power; one hour of content uses about 400kW for analysis. So the goal is to reduce that by 90% within the next two years. Because we are cloud native, every kilowatt we’re spending in the cloud costs money. That impacts on our margin and will also impact on the price we can offer customers. It also affects our carbon footprint.”
Newsbridge has more than doubled its recurring revenue in the past 12 months and recent new customer wins include football clubs Bayer Leverkusen and Olympique de Marseille, German public broadcaster SWR and media company Brut.
Stand Number: 7.B09
Company: Newsbridge
No comments yet