IBC 2018: Veritone acquires Machine Box AI engine
Veritone (stand 5.A09), the creator of the operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWARE, announced its acquisition of Machine Box, a developer of machine learning technologies that give organisations a suite of simple yet robust tools and models to create customized AI engines that can be deployed to enhance new or existing business solutions. Machine Box provides an elegant reference architecture across multiple cognitive categories, including face and object recognition, text analytics, data classification, and personalised recommendation. This intuitive toolkit provides developers a guide to design and deploy (on-premise or in the cloud) tailored AI engines. When coupled with the Veritone AI operating system, developers, systems integrators, and end customers will be able to produce bespoke, end-to-end AI-informed solutions for their specific use cases that can be deployed anywhere, accommodating for security and regulatory compliance requirements.
A recent Gartner report predicted that by 2022, one-third of application development projects will leverage hosted AI services, with fewer than 5% of those application developers building their own AI models. Another Gartner report outlined some of the challenges CIOs face in implementing home-grown, AI-based solutions, including the difficulty of acquiring all-encompassing internal skills to construct algorithms and train models, and to “monitor, maintain, and govern the [AI] environment.” The combination of Machine Box’s proven tools with the flexibility and ease-of-use of Veritone’s aiWARE operating system will address these key barriers, making it easier for users to deploy configurable, future-proof solutions.
Chad Steelberg, Veritone’s Founder & CEO says, “A founding principle of Veritone’s philosophy and technology has been democratized, robust and platform-agnostic AI capabilities. Veritone’s unique AI operating system, ecosystem of hundreds of cognitive engines and intuitive set of applications have been a major step forward in making AI solutions accessible to a greater number of people and organizations than ever before. This acquisition is another major step on that path — Machine Box’s AI toolkit, which fits perfectly with Veritone’s portable architecture and standards, will allow technology-savvy individuals to quickly and easily train any number of cognitive engines to create custom models deployable where they need them to enhance their business offerings.”
Machine Box CEO Aaron Edell says, “We are very excited to be joining forces with Veritone – their global reach and established presence as a trusted AI software provider and standards setter, combined with Machine Box’s easy-to-use AI toolkit, will enable users to progress quickly from a standing start to sophisticated use of artificial intelligence. This will further democratize AI capabilities, and we believe that it will also go a long way toward establishing company-agnostic standards for AI technology.”
The Machine Box toolkits will be made available as a part of the Veritone Developer application environment for existing and new accounts to leverage.
The consideration paid by Veritone in the acquisition was $2.0 million, plus an earn-out of up to $3.0 million based on the achievement of certain milestones. Such consideration is comprised of a combination of Veritone shares and cash.