Cloud storage company Wasabi Technologies has acquired Curio AI from GrayMeta.
Terms of the deal were not shared, but it includes the intellectual property of Curio AI and the team behind it.
The acquisition will enable Wasabi to use Curio AI's technology as part of its storage offering for the media and entertainment industry. Video stored in Wasabi will have AI-generated second-by-second indexing and metadata, making it easier to find footage in massive stores.
The offering is set to be widely available in Spring 2024.
“A video archive without detailed metadata is like a library without a card catalog,” said 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."
Wasabi hopes to target media and entertainment businesses which may currently be storing vast quantities of video footage on aging tape systems without a quick way of sorting through them. Friend also told DCD in a call that the solution could be useful for going through surveillance footage in-post.
The AI will only use data owned by the customer, and is able to identify people, places, events, emotions, logos, landmarks, background audio, and can transcribe speech in more than 50 languages.
Alongside the intellectual property, Wasabi will gain the team behind the solution, including GrayMeta CEO Aaron Edell, who will take the role of senior vice president of AI and machine learning.
“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. We believe this will be the most significant advance in the storage industry since the invention of object storage,” said Edell.
Wasabi Technology focuses solely on cloud storage offerings and was founded by Friend and Jeff Flowers. The company counts Liverpool Football Club among its customers, with the team migrating to Wasabi in March 2023.
