Taming the endless accumulation of content lands €7 million in Newsbridge’s kitty

Every two years, the volume of content produced worldwide doubles. More content produced equals more content stored. Faced with the challenge of managing this endless stream of new video, photo, and audio content, broadcasters, sports rights-holders and brands need to find a way to scale the indexing and archiving of their media assets and make them accessible from anywhere at any time. Organisations also increasingly seek to tap into their valuable archives, and reduce their carbon footprint in line with corporate sustainability goals.

Enter French AI and cloud media company Newsbridge. It has brought in €7 million in Series A funding to continue its expansion to the U.S. and continue its R&D in multimodal AI indexing for media assets. The round was led by Supernova Invest and backed by VC Elaia Partners and angel investor Dominique Edelin.

Founded by twin brothers Frédéric and Philippe Petitpont in 2016, the platform aims to redefine the way media teams manage, store and index audiovisual content. Unlike traditional AI which relies on a single source for indexing, the startup claims its disruptive multimodal AI merges detection results from face, text, objects, pattern,s and transcription to produce highly accurate metadata and search results. This in turn leads to new revenue streams, accelerated workflows and content assets that will live forever.

According to the company, it has more than doubled its recurring revenue in the last 12 months and recent new customer wins including football clubs Bayer Leverkusen and Olympique de Marseille, German public broadcaster SWR and media company Brut.

Talking about its expansion plans post the funding, Newsbridge co-founder and CEO Philippe Petitpont said: “With this latest financing, we’ll be opening our first U.S office in New York. We’re also going to further strengthen our business in Europe and the Middle East with the hiring of dedicated regional managers. We want to continue to innovate in content searchability and will reinforce our team with additional AI and media engineering talent. Alongside this, we want both Newsbridge and our customers to lower their carbon footprint. Currently, up to 450-watt hours can be needed for each hour of AI-powered media processing. Our goal is to reduce that number by 90% in the next two years.”

Romain Sautrau, investment director at Supernova Invest, added: “In a very mature industry, Newsbridge is coming with a fresh approach empowered by Artificial Intelligence. We were impressed by the performance of its multimodal deep learning platform. We’re excited to lead this next phase of growth into new geographies.”