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Veritone reported stronger results for its fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 (ended Dec. 31), driven by its aiWARE Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Solutions and advertising businesses, according to company executives.

Q4 revenue grew 35% from a year earlier to $16.8 million, with aiWARE Solutions revenue soaring 53% to $4.4 million and ad revenue, including the contribution of Veritone’s VeriAds Network, jumping 50% to $9.7 million.

“2020 was a pivotal year for the planet, with COVID and social unrest shaking the very foundations of society, and yet in the midst of this turmoil, Veritone demonstrated great agility and speed of thought and execution to not only survive, but thrive,” Chad Steelberg, CEO and chairman of Veritone, told analysts March 4 on an earnings call.

The company’s “efforts are paying off,” he said, pointing to its Q4 revenue performance. “Today, we are guiding to 2021 full year revenue growth in excess of 40 percent, at the high end of our range, driven by our SaaS business growing” 60-65%, he projected.

Last year, Veritone’s aiWARE artificial intelligence (AI) operating system “came into its own as a full-fledged distributed intelligent operating system, with massive performance, reliability and deployment improvement,” he said. “As a result, demand for our cognitive solutions from our customers and partners across multiple markets this past year is accelerating.”

AiWARE has already been helping law enforcement partners and, “soon, aiWARE will be helping the U.S. government and our allies to analyze huge volumes of aerial images faster and more accurately than humans to identify threats to our national security,” he told analysts.

A New Veritone Market

Most recently, Veritone “focused the power of aiWARE on addressing the enormous reliability and safety challenges facing electric utilities, as they struggle to manage extreme weather, natural disasters and unpredictable green energy sources with aging grid technology that largely still relies on human-in-the-loop decision-making,” he said.

Initial customer data from Veritone’s “forecasting engine, combined with our optimization technology, leads us to believe that our technology will enable our current and future utility partners to realize significant reduction in their spending reserves, protect critical grid infrastructure and reduce costs, while at the same time, improving the quality and reliability of service to their customers,” he explained. “We believe aiWARE is uniquely positioned to solve these distributed challenges in AI energy management market, which is projected to exceed $7.8 billion by 2024.”

During the Q&A, he was asked if AI could have helped Texas avoid its recent power-related disaster. He replied: “When you really peel back the covers of what happened there, yes, we could have forecasted it. Yes, our modeling and control software would have given operators, I think, a much better picture” of what would happen.

He conceded that the “confluence of…. factors, regardless of controlling energy, was so catastrophic that I don’t think we would have been able to mitigate much of it” in that exact case.

But he added: “As the infrastructure and independent power providers begin to flourish on the market,” Veritone’s AI would be “able to pull in additional power from areas not being hit by that storm on a dynamic real-time basis to mitigate a lot of the impact…. So with the current infrastructure probably difficult, but with what’s planned in the future and what we’ve seen on the road map for a lot of utilities, our technology would have been absolutely critical to mitigating” what happened.

Although “the path to recovery from COVID-19 and all of economic and social fallout continues to evolve, we remain focused on our core mission, to harness the power of AI and help build a safer, more vibrant, transparent and empowered society,” he went on  to tell analysts.

Two Key Deals

Veritone is now “delivering AI solutions to thousands of customers,” according to Ryan Steelberg, the company’s president, who pointed to two key partnership deals announced in Q4: AiWARE adding support for the Nvidia CUDA parallel computing platform for GPU-based AI and machine learning and integration that enables Alteryx customers to gain unparalleled insight into unstructured data sources. Veritone went on to announce integration with Nvidia’s EGX platform.

“In the case of Alteryx, we’ve completed our technical integration, and are working directly with the company’s leadership and customers to deliver unprecedented aiWARE capabilities and develop new use cases,” he said, adding: “AiWARE is now available to Alteryx’s 7,000-plus end customers as a self-service cloud service for a few hundred dollars per user per month.”

That integration “represents a significant milestone for Veritone, and we plan to replicate this integration with other leading data analytics platforms,” he noted.

Veritone also submitted a proposal to provide aiWARE “within various groups in the Department of Defense and the broader intelligence community,” and the company “recently completed a successful proof of concept project for a Canadian government entity expanding our federal government efforts beyond our domestic market,” he added. “In summary, we expect strong momentum and organic growth across all of our markets in 2021.”

The company plans to host a technology expo in May, following the report of its Q1 earnings, CFO Michael Zemetra also pointed out on the call.