Veveo
Veveo develops intelligent conversational interfaces for mobile and video devices, and apps that are adaptable to the user's context.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
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| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
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$69.0m Valuation: $69.0m | Acquisition | ||
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Veveo, established in 2004 by serial entrepreneurs Murali Aravamudan and Ajit Rajasekharan, specialized in video search and personalization technologies. The Andover, Massachusetts-based company developed conversational interfaces for connected devices, enabling users to interact with technology through natural language. Murali Aravamudan, a seasoned inventor and engineer with a background at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies, had previously founded and sold Winphoria Networks to Motorola for $200 million. This deep experience in telecommunications and network technology directly informed Veveo's mission to solve content discovery challenges on input-constrained devices like televisions and mobile phones.
Veveo’s core offering was its patented SmartRelevance™ Conversational Platform, a business-to-business solution for service providers and device manufacturers. The platform used semantic technologies and a proprietary knowledge graph to power intelligent search, personalization, and recommendation engines. This allowed the company's clients, which included major players like AT&T, Verizon, Nokia, and Comcast, to provide their end-users with a more intuitive and personalized content discovery experience, ultimately aiming to drive user engagement and monetization. The technology was deployed on over 100 million devices and was backed by a significant intellectual property portfolio of more than 50 granted patents and numerous applications.
The company's growth was fueled by venture capital, raising approximately $14 million in a 2007 Series A round from investors including Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and North Bridge Venture Partners. After a decade of operation, Veveo's strategic importance in the burgeoning field of entertainment discovery led to its acquisition by Rovi Corporation in February 2014. The deal was valued at approximately $62 million in cash, with an additional $7 million contingent on meeting certain milestones, positioning Rovi to enhance its own entertainment metadata and guide solutions with Veveo's advanced semantic and natural language capabilities.
Keywords: conversational interface, content discovery, video search, semantic search, personalization engine, recommendation technology, natural language processing, connected devices, media technology, Rovi acquisition, Murali Aravamudan, Ajit Rajasekharan, SmartRelevance, entertainment discovery, metadata solutions, voice control, knowledge graph, intelligent search, set-top boxes, mobile video