AI’s Hidden Gold Rush

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Sponsored by Veritone, Inc. 

When most people think about AI, they picture chatbots or self-driving cars. But some of the biggest opportunities are in the less flashy, behind-the-scenes work like making AI models smarter and more reliable.

That is where Veritone comes in.

Founded in 2014 as one of the first pure-play AI companies, Veritone was an early pioneer in the field. The company’s origins stem from its leadership’s deep expertise in advertising technology, where they spotted a growing challenge: most of the world’s data is unstructured—such as audio, video, and other formats that traditional systems couldn’t easily interpret. As multimedia consumption surged, they recognized that unlocking the value of this data was essential to effectively serve, target, and monetize content. That vision became the foundation of Veritone’s mission: turning complex, unstructured data into actionable intelligence through AI.

Today, the company builds enterprise AI software that helps clients manage and make sense of large libraries of unstructured audio, video, and text data and transform them into actionable insights and new monetization opportunities.  For over ten years, Veritone has successfully transformed unstructured data, including licensing, monetization and management of IP rights, for over 3,000 customers in the commercial and public sectors.

What They Do and Why It Matters

Veritone is an AI company that builds enterprise software to help organizations process, analyze, and act on huge volumes of unstructured data. This can be anything from video and audio files to text documents.

Their core platform, called aiWARE^TM, works like an operating system for AI. It connects a customer’s data to hundreds of AI models, both third party and in-house, letting companies choose the right model for each specific task instead of locking into just one.They sell this into industries that have massive data challenges and strict compliance rules. 

Today, law enforcement agencies use Veritone to solve cases in hours, not months. In the very near future, investigating crimes without this type of digital media analysis will be as outdated as ignoring DNA evidence. Sports networks spin decades of dusty archives into million-dollar revenue engines and fan obsessions. Work that once consumed hundreds of human hours now happens instantly.

This matters because most organizations cannot build or manage AI infrastructure on their own. They lack the data science talent, computing power, and compliance expertise to deploy AI at scale. Veritone gives them an AI layer that plugs into what they already have, helping them adopt AI faster without rebuilding their entire tech stack.

With the rapid growth of generative AI, the number of AI models is expanding quickly. The companies that can orchestrate and manage those models for large organizations could become gatekeepers in the space. Veritone is positioning itself to be one of them.

Market Opportunity

The AI software market is expected to grow into the hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade. A huge portion of that growth will come from enterprise adoption, where companies need secure, flexible tools to integrate AI into existing workflows.

Veritone’s target markets are large and diverse. In media alone, there are thousands of broadcasters, content owners, sporting teams, and leagues looking to monetize decades of archived video and audio. In the public sector, there is increasing demand for AI tools that can speed up investigations and improve public safety without adding more manpower. 

If Veritone can deepen its footprint in just a few of these verticals, it could tap into recurring, high-margin revenue streams that grow as customers expand their AI use cases. That combination of industry diversity and sticky customer relationships is what gives this market potential real staying power.

Strategic Positioning and Leadership

Veritone has carved out a defensible spot in the enterprise AI market by focusing on flexibility, compliance, and vertical-specific execution. While many providers push a single AI model or a closed platform, Veritone has built an open AI ecosystem that integrates more than 800 unique engines from both third-party and in-house vendors. This approach lets customers adapt quickly as better models emerge, avoiding the long-term lock-in that comes with most hyperscale cloud offerings. 

Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) is designed for the generative AI era, giving enterprises a way to centralize, clean, and label massive volumes of unstructured data. The goal is to create training sets that improve the accuracy of large language and multimodal models, while meeting strict standards like GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2. Few competitors address this bottleneck in enterprise AI adoption at the same scale or compliance level.

Veritone has also built strong distribution channels. Its presence on the AWS Marketplace allows customers to access AI tools and turnkey solutions on a pay-as-you-go basis, lowering procurement friction and shortening deployment timelines. This is particularly valuable for organizations that want to test or scale AI capabilities without lengthy contract negotiations.

The company’s vertical expansion goes beyond its core industries. Sports and live events present a growth avenue, with Veritone already providing real-time video analytics, automated highlight creation, and fan engagement tools for professional leagues. These applications could be replicated across other data-rich event categories.

Leadership and Culture

President and CEO Ryan Steelberg has a track record in scaling SaaS and cloud businesses, with his previous business being sold to Google, where he led their offline advertising business. Since its founding, he has guided Veritone from a single-purpose transcription tool to a multi-industry AI platform. 

The company promotes a “people first, tech second” philosophy, designing AI to augment rather than replace human decision-making. This has shaped products like iDEMS, which includes privacy-by-design features to protect civil liberties. An internal AI ethics committee reviews model provenance, bias mitigation, and data privacy compliance, and transparency reports are shared publicly.

Innovation is supported by 48 U.S. and foreign patents covering AI orchestration, media analytics, and secure data pipelines. Veritone also maintains partnerships with cloud providers to co-develop new models and integrations. Customer adoption is encouraged through embedded solution architects, AI training academies, and an annual hackathon that fosters co-innovation with clients and partners.

Financials and Earnings

Veritone reached the top end of its updated guidance this quarter, reporting $24.0 million in revenue. Its Software Products and Services revenue grew 12% and core AI growth grew 45%. The impressive Q2 results were driven by continued demand and underpinned by the Company’s new contract with the United States Air Force and the qualified and near-term Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) pipeline of over $20 million.

One area to watch is their Public Sector business, which grew 90% year-over-year, driven by the new Air Force contract and a total of 35 new public sector customers during the quarter including the Riverside County Sheriff's Department and a top 5 police agency in the U.S. With a near-term, qualified pipeline of $189 million, the Public Sector business is poised for continued growth.  

Conclusion

Veritone is sitting in the middle of some powerful trends. Government agencies are under pressure to modernize. Media companies are looking for ways to manage and monetize their content libraries faster. AI adoption is only going to accelerate in both areas.

The company’s mix of recurring revenue, a growing government footprint, and a deep pipeline gives it time to execute. If management can keep expenses in check and deliver on their path to profitability, Veritone has the potential to turn its position in niche AI markets into real long-term value.

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