BOSTON - Cloud storage provider Wasabi Technologies (https://wasabi.com) has acquired Curio AI from GrayMeta, Inc., a technology that creates a second-by-second index of video stored in Wasabi. While terms of the deal were not disclosed, the acquisition includes both the intellectual property and the team behind Curio, including GrayMeta CEO Aaron Edell, who joins Wasabi as senior vice president of AI and machine learning. Wasabi will incorporate the Curio AI technology into a new class of AI-powered intelligent storage for the media & entertainment industry, which it plans to release this spring.
“A video archive without detailed metadata is like a library without a card catalog,” explains David Friend, CEO of Wasabi Technologies. “This is where AI comes in. AI can find faces, logos, objects and even specific voices. Without it, finding exactly the segments you are looking for requires tedious and time-consuming manual effort. The acquisition of Curio AI will allow us to revolutionize media storage."
The company sees video as one of the biggest opportunities in the storage industry, with hundreds of exabytes of video archives existing on aging tape systems, and many more exabytes generated every year from film, television, sporting events, news, advertising, corporate communications and raw footage. Without searchable metadata, it’s time consuming and inefficient to find video segments.
Curio AI is an intelligent data platform that uses AI to generate rich metadata for media libraries, and enables editors and producers to instantly search and retrieve specific media segments based on people, places, events, emotions, logos, landmarks, background audio and more. Curio AI can also detect and transcribe speech in over 50 spoken languages. Customers benefit from more personalized experiences with hyper specific detail, allowing organizations to deliver relevant content to market as fast as possible. Wasabi’s Curio AI-powered storage will provide customers with the metadata it needs to manage troves of digital assets at very fast speed.
“AI-powered storage will allow Wasabi customers to instantly find exactly what they need amongst millions of hours of footage, and unleash the value in their archives,” says Edell. “We believe this will be the most significant advance in the storage industry since the invention of object storage. I look forward to working with Dave and the exceptional team he has built to write a new future for the media & entertainment industry.”