Veritone

Not to be confused with Verifone.

Veritone, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence technology company based in Irvine, California founded in 2014. It serves a variety of industries including media, professional sports teams, federal government agencies, energy utilities, and state and local police departments.

Veritone

Company type	Public
Traded as	Nasdaq: VERI

The company’s products and services are used by its wholly owned subsidiaries: advertising agency Veritone One and Veritone Digital, which provides content management solutions^[buzzword] and licensing services. Its proprietary operating system, aiWARE, is deployed across more than 2,000 customers, including police agencies, state and local district attorney offices, media conglomerates, radio and TV stations, and movie studios.^[1]

In addition to the company's Costa Mesa office, they have offices in San Diego, California, Denver, Colorado, Binghamton, New York, New York City, Washington, D.C., and London, England.^[1] Ryan Steelberg is the company's president, chief executive officer and chairman of the board.

History

The company was founded in 2014^[2] and went public via on May 12, 2017. Their losses were $59.6 million that year.^[1]

In April 2020, the company received a $6.5 million in federally backed small business loans from Sunwest Bank as part of the Paycheck Protection Program. The company received scrutiny over this loan, which meant to protect small and private businesses. Washington Post noted the high compensation to the Steelberg brothers.^[3][4][5][2]

In May 2020 Veritone announced it would return the full $6.5 million loan and issued a statement that it had "adequate financial flexibility and additional avenues to maintain our capital position."^[6]

Criticism

The American Civil Liberties Union has publicly criticized Veritone for their product Track, which analyzes video to identify and follow individuals based on a variety of visual characteristics. By using a wider variety of characteristics, the product avoids regulation that bans automated biometric surveillance such as facial recognition.^[7][8] It also offers to track vehicles by make, model, and characteristics to avoid automatic number-plate recognition restraints.^[9] The Track product has been evaluated and used by law enforcement in the United States^[10] but the legality of this approach remains unsettled.^[11]

Veritone AI uses

Media and Entertainment

Veritone Attribute and Discovery are products for measuring ad effectiveness by correlating ad airings with target website activity. The products are used by iHeartMedia.^[12]

NotForgotten Digital Preservation Library digital time capsules use Veritone's cognitive capabilities adding automated video transcription and metadata creation to make large volumes of video content in the Time Capsules easily searchable.^[13]

Government and public safety

The company’s Veritone Redact software is used at police departments to redact personally identifiable or compromising information from video or photographic evidence.^[14] In May 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice signed a contract with Veritone to use its AI-enabled audio and video transcription and translation services.^[15] Veritone Redact is also used by government compliance provider GovQA.^[16]

Energy

In October 2020, the company announced Veritone Energy, an AI tool to predict optimal energy supply mix and pricing to meet grid demand.^[17] On July 9, 2023, GridBeyond acquired Veritone’s Energy division.