French AI and cloud media startup Newsbridge has just raised €7 million in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Supernova Invest (which backed Continuity and Contentsquare) alongside continued support from VC Elaia Partners and angel investor Dominique Edelin.
Opens office in New York
With this investment, Newsbridge will continue its expansion in North America by opening its first office in New York. The company will also hire top AI and Media Engineering talent to continue its R&D in Multimodal AI Indexing for media assets.
Unlike traditional AI which relies on a single source for indexing, Newsbridge’s disruptive Multimodal AI merges detection results from face, text, objects, pattern and transcription to produce highly accurate metadata and search results.
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, said, “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”.
Newsbridge Co-Founder and CTO Frederic Petitpont adds, “Thanks to Multimodal AI-powered indexing, our customers can navigate to specific moments in their vast media collections. Today’s live is tomorrow’s archive, and when content is easily searchable, it becomes reusable and potentially unlocks new revenue streams.”
Founded by twin brothers
Newsbridge was co-founded by twin brothers Frédéric and Philippe Petitpont in 2016. They were driven by a desire to redefine the way media teams manage, store and index audiovisual content. In addition to making content accessible from anywhere at any time, organisations can also reduce their carbon footprint in line with corporate sustainability goals.
With the most advanced Multimodal AI Indexing technology on the market, Newsbridge is allowing organisations to simultaneously preserve their heritage and make it accessible from anywhere in a single click. The result is new revenue streams, greatly accelerated workflows and content assets that will live forever.
The solution allows for smart and efficient media asset management, be it managing and accessing live recordings, clipping highlights, future-friendly archiving, content retrieval or content showcasing and monetisation.
Newsbridge has more than doubled its recurring revenue in the last 12 months and recent new customer wins include football clubs Bayer Leverkusen and Olympique de Marseille, German public broadcaster SWR and media company Brut.
