Veritone Signs Agreement to Acquire Wazee Digital, Expanding Digital Asset Monetization Capabilities to Existing and Future Media and Entertainment, Government Customers
Veritone® Inc. (NASDAQ: VERI) today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire Wazee Digital, a leading provider of cloud-native video management and licensing services that enable rights holders to monetize and enrich their content. Veritone, the world’s only SaaS-based operating system for Artificial Intelligence (AI), will offer the Wazee Digital applications and services into the Media and Entertainment as well as Government markets, uniquely providing Veritone customers with the ability to drive expanded revenue opportunities from their existing video, still images and audio assets.
The consideration to be paid by Veritone in the transaction is $15.0 million, with such consideration being payable $7.5 million in cash and $7.5 million in Veritone common stock. Wazee Digital, based in Denver, Colorado, had net revenues of over $19 million in 2017. The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions and is expected to close by the end of August 2018. San Francisco-based GCA Advisors served as banking advisor to Veritone on this transaction, and Waller Capital Partners, headquartered in New York, advised Wazee Digital.
“Wazee Digital has a dynamic content licensing and asset management business, one of the most comprehensive operational platforms for monetization of digital media assets with a fantastic roster of blue-chip customers. And now, as a result of the recent integration between Wazee Digital’s asset management platform and Veritone’s operating system for Artificial Intelligence — aiWARE™ — joint customers can fully index, categorize, and package content Wazee Digital’s platform, resulting in unparalleled, additional revenue opportunities,” said Chad Steelberg, Veritone Founder & CEO.
Leveraging best-in-class Asset management and Monetization capabilities
Said Harris Morris, Wazee Chairman and CEO, “We’re extremely excited to leverage our best-in-class asset management and monetization capabilities with Veritone’s unique cloud-based AI operating system. The combined solution will provide existing Wazee Digital customers such as HBO, Bloomberg, Viacom, and FremantleMedia a proven, productized, and enterprise-grade solution to intelligently identify new ways to capitalize the value of their marquee content and ensure that content securely reaches its rightful audiences around the globe.” Added Chad Hamilton, the Vice President, Technology at FremantleMedia, “I am excited to see how our partnership with Wazee Digital benefits from the expertise and increased insight that Veritone enables through artificial intelligence. By incorporating AI into our cloud-based media asset management workflow, FremantleMedia will have the ability to extract more value from our assets.”
Veritone and Wazee Digital have been collaborating together as technology partners since 2017, with the first integration of the company’s products completed in April of this year. The Wazee Digital management team will add leadership and expertise by integrating into Veritone’s existing team. Veritone will apply its go-to-market capabilities and growing sales channels to cross-sell aiWARE to existing Wazee Digital customers and Wazee Digital’s products and services to Veritone customers and channels. Veritone will also be marketing the combined offering into other verticals where the collection, management and subsequent retrieval of key video, still images and audio assets are essential.
Further Reading
FremantleMedia Centralizes Content and Facilitates Access Through Wazee Digital
Webinar On Demand: Centralized Content Access, Delivery & Monetization