Exclusives

Veritone has seen strong initial demand for MARVEL.ai, the complete end-to-end voice-as-a-Sservice solution that it launched at its analyst day event in May, according to Brian Alger, the company’s SVP of corporate development and investor relations.

“Already we are seeing thousands of inbound inquiries into leveraging this new service… business model,” he said Aug. 11, during the Oppenheimer 24th Annual Technology, Internet & Communications Conference.

“Whether it’s on-air talent or movie production or audible books, the applications for synthetic, hyper-realistic, verified, properly licensed voice content is very, very big and Veritone, because of its position in the marketplace, is exceptionally positioned for it,” he said.

Veritone recently reported strong results for its second quarter (ended June 30) that he said included revenue of $19.2 million, up 45 percent from the same quarter a year ago. “Within that, we saw exceptional growth within our SaaS Solutions business, which was up 86 percent,” he noted.

Veritone scored “a bunch of wins in the past quarter,” including Sports Illustrated, he said. Veritone will serve as the official video technology and licensing partner of Sports Illustrated as part of a recently announced deal.

“The business just continues to grow across all of our sectors,” Alger noted. “But, hands down, the most important news that we talked about was the acquisition of PandoLogic,” announced in July, he said. “It is a transformative acquisition” that is “expected to close late in the third quarter,” in mid-September, he added, noting PandoLogic is growing quickly.

PandoLogic is “doing more than $50 million in revenue on a pro forma basis for 2021 and it’s generating nearly 50 percent EBITDA margins,” he pointed out. The company operates an automated talent acquisition platform that runs on artificial intelligence, and “leverage an ecosystem of network partners” that are a “veritable who’s who of” names in the hiring and recruitment process, he said. Those names include CareerBuilder, Craigslist, Facebook, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, Monster and ZipRecruiter.

PandoLogic “has direct links into all of them and they’re leveraging AI to make the recruitment process more automated, more efficient and much more cost-effective,” he said.

The acquisition represents the “first horizontal play within Veritone” and “allows us to literally go into every industry around the globe because everybody has to hire people,” he explained, adding: “We see huge opportunities down the road to leverage our vertical approach with this horizontal play.”

“With over 90 percent gross margins and over 50 percent EBITDA margins, [PandoLogic] has a huge impact on the profile of our company.”

The problem that AI continues to solve is the “data explosion” that we have seen, he went on to say. “North of 80 percent” of the data being created today is “unstructured in its nature and in order to interpret and apply cognition to that unstructured data, you need to have artificial intelligence – humans can’t do it and structured relational database software is not capable of handling it,” he explained.

Veritone, meanwhile, is now on the third generation of its aiWARE AI platform and “we’ve seen a very rapid acceleration in our business since launching aiWARE 3.0 at the beginning of 2020,” he also said. The latest generation enabled the operating system to be used in any environment, on any device. That software flexibility has “enabled very, very rapid product development [and] also in-market expansion” that stands to get an even larger lift from the addition of PandoLogic, he noted.

The company plans to “expand internationally over time,” he said during the Q&A with Martin Yang, a senior analyst at Oppenheimer.