M+E Connections

Hot cloud storage FIRM Wasabi Technologies has acquired Curio AI from GrayMeta, the companies announced. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition includes both the intellectual property and the team behind Curio, including GrayMeta CEO Aaron Edell, who will join Wasabi as SVP of AI and machine learning.

Wasabi will incorporate the Curio AI technology into a new class of AI-powered intelligent storage for the media and entertainment industry which it plans to release in spring 2024.

Curio AI creates a second-by-second index of video stored in Wasabi. “A video archive without detailed metadata is like a library without a card catalogue,” said Wasabi CEO David Friend. “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 revolutionise media storage.”

Video is one of the biggest opportunities in the storage industry. Hundreds of exabytes of video archives exist on aging tape systems, and many more exabytes are generated every year from film, television, sporting events, news, advertising, corporate communications, and countless hours of valuable raw footage and outtakes. Without searchable metadata, it’s extremely time consuming and inefficient to find video segments you need at any given moment.

Curio AI is an intelligent data platform that uses AI to generate rich metadata for media libraries and enables editors and producers to instantly search and retrieve specific media segments based on people, places, events, emotions, logos, landmarks, background audio and more. Curio AI can also detect and transcribe speech in over 50 spoken languages. Customers benefit from more personalised experiences with hyper specific detail, allowing organisations to deliver relevant content to market as fast as possible. Wasabi’s Curio AI-powered storage will provide customers with the metadata it needs to manage troves of digital assets with lightning-fast speed.

“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,” Edell said. “I look forward to working with Dave and the exceptional team he has built to write a new future for the media and entertainment industry.”

Friend added: “Wasabi is on a trajectory that few others in the industry can claim. The advantage of being a hyper-focused company is that we can lead the industry in terms of price, performance, reliability, and innovation. With the acquisition of Curio AI, we are now set to introduce the industry’s first AI-powered intelligent storage. Like Wasabi’s standard cloud storage, our Curio AI-powered storage will be simple, fast, reliable, and inexpensive. With the acquisition of Curio AI, our customers will not only be able to store data but locate and instantly retrieve exactly what they want.”