Newsbridge Closes €7 Million Series A Funding Round to Develop U.S. Presence, Recruit Top AI And Media Engineering Talent

Newsbridge, an AI & cloud media company, raised 7 million euros in Series A funding round to continue its expansion to the U.S.A, and 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. Supernova Invest leads the round, with continued support from VC Elaia Partners and angel investor Dominique Edelin.

Newsbridge said 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.

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.”

Newbridge said that 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 rightsholders and brands must find a way to scale the indexing and archiving of their media assets, and make them accessible from anywhere at any time. Organizations also increasingly seek to tap into their valuable archives, and reduce their carbon footprint in line with corporate sustainability goals.

Newsbridge provides access to content through its disruptive multimodal AI indexing and cloud media hub. It said its AI “automatically identifies faces, objects, logos, written text, transcribes audio and provides semantic context. Be it for managing and accessing live recordings, clipping highlights, future-friendly archiving, content retrieval or content showcasing and monetization, Newsbridge’s scalable product solution enables smart and efficient media asset management.”

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 added: “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.”

Newsbridge is exhibiting at IBC 2022 in Amsterdam at stand B09, Hall 7.