Wall Street in about the past month is liking the story of artificial intelligence and media firm Veritone Inc.
Investors have pushed up shares of the Costa Mesa-based company about 39% over that period to a market value of $847.2 million.
The most recent pop came April 21 and 22, when shares jumped 23% after the company’s aiWARE system took home the Best of Show Award at the IBC2017, one of the leading trade shows of the media, entertainment and technology sectors.
The strong run was aided a few weeks earlier by favorable coverage by Fortune and Barron’s.
Veritone has announced some recent partnerships with Dalet Digital Media Systems, a French company leveraging Veritone’s AI technology for automated metadata extraction and analysis, including speech-to-text transcription, translation, content moderation, and logo and optical character recognition; and with Denver-based Wazee Digital, which provides cloud video management and licensing services.
Veritone doubled sales in the second quarter to $4.1 million while posting a loss of $21.5 million compared to a loss of $6.5 million a year earlier.
The company, established in 2014 by Corona del Mar entrepreneurs Ryan and Chad Steelberg, posted most of the revenue gains through its traditional ad-buying business.
Its developing AI business increased revenue by $300,000, up from just $73,000 a year earlier. The gains in the AI business were driven by an increase of 33 customers to 38 total and a year-to-year jump from $24,000 to $132,000 in monthly recurring revenue through the second quarter.
Veritone raised $37.5 million in a May initial public offering.
Its stock’s meteoric rise is welcome news for Newport Beach-based patent licenser Acacia Research Corp., which has a 31% stake in the company and is up about 50% since Veritone became a Wall Street darling.
Corent-Ingram Deal
Aliso Viejo-based Corent has signed a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro Inc. that will expand its flagship offering to the company’s massive network of cloud and managed service providers and their enterprise customers.
Corent’s automated software migration allows developers and enterprises to quickly and easily move products to a subscription service via the cloud or a web portal. Its cloud application management service, SurPASS, is billed as a way to trim years of research and development, speed time to market, and reduce or eliminate customers’ engineering costs and maintenance.
Santa Ana-based Ingram, which was acquired late last year for $6 billion by Chinese conglomerate Tianjin Tianhai Investment Company Ltd., is the world’s largest distributor of technology products, with revenue last year of nearly $42 billion. It’s also the biggest distributor of cloud applications and services.
Corent founder Feyzi Fatehi was honored in March with a Business Journal Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award. The company has key relationships with Google, Dell, Amazon, Accenture, Cisco and Intel, all big names in cloud-storage capacity.
Corent, a word play on core enterprise, has Boeing and IBM among its major customers.
The company, unlike other tech companies in its position, has raised only $17 million to date and hasn’t taken institutional funding, instead relying on private investors—many in Orange County’s executive ranks—as well as board members and its own employees, primarily in management.
Blizzard of Teams
Blizzard Entertainment Inc.’s upstart Overwatch League has attracted the final three teams to kick off its inaugural season.
The newest owners, in Philadelphia, Dallas and Houston—which reportedly ponied up more than $20 million per franchise—include Comcast Spectacor, the Philadelphia Flyers owner and sports arm of cable giant Comcast; OpTic Gaming and its investor group, led by Texas Rangers co-owner Neil Leibman; and Dallas oil and natural gas magnate Kenneth Hersh.
The league based on the smash hit, first-person shooter “Overwatch,” which has grown into a $1 billion business since its May 2016 release, includes franchises in Boston, London, Los Angeles, Miami-Orlando, New York, San Francisco, Seoul and Shanghai.
