Artificial intelligence video start-up Oovvuu has hit fast-forward on its development plans, collecting an eye-raising $3.8 million in startup funding.
The capital raising was co-led by emerging company specialists Cygnet Capital and early-stage investors and advisors Capital Pitch.
Oovvuu uses advanced technology to automate the process of matching relevant videos with online news articles on trusted news sources around the globe.
The company reports that despite massive growth in online video consumption, only seven percent of news articles feature relevant videos, currently.
The technology, through a platform known as Compass, can match up to 1,000 videos to relevant articles in less than a second, far exceeding manual processing.
While the scale of Oovvuu’s technology is impressive, the breadth of its commercial partnerships are equally remarkable, particularly for an emerging company, founded in 2014.
The company was established by former Fairfax Media and broadcast executives and has leveraged off these connections to now have agreements with 75 global broadcasters providing content for publishers in 143 countries in near-real time.
Oovvuu’s content partners already include global broadcasters, including the BBC, Bloomberg, Press Association and Techcrunch.
Discussing the significance of the capital raising, founder and CEO Ricky Sutton said: “The outcome is to build a consortium of publishers and broadcasters to distribute quality news and help them boost media earnings and maximise reach of feature relevant videos.”
“A billion people are watching news video today, and all the data shows they want more.
Publishers see this massive audience demand, but they cannot make enough video to meet it. Broadcasters on the other hand, have the video, but until Oovvuu, they lacked an automated instant global distribution model,” he said.
The raising will significantly accelerate Oovvuu’s development path, with the company selected by IBM to join its Global Entrepreneur Program in 2016.
The following year, it joined Airbnb and Slack in the Amazon Activate program, and was also awarded Disruptor of the Year by leading research group IDC.
