Memories.ai, an innovative new video artificial intelligence startup, has closed an impressively successful $8 million round of seed funding. This investment will enable the company to expand its innovative proprietary technology. Susa Ventures led the round, with participation from some really good investors that punched above their weight. Included in this group were Samsung Next, Fusion Fund, Crane Ventures, Seedcamp and Creator Ventures. This funding will enable the company to expand its team. It will further improve its discovery and search functionalities and position the company as the leading player in video analytics space.
Dr. Shawn Shen and Enmin (Ben) Zhou co-founded Memories.ai. The company’s goal is to improve its ability to decode and categorize video content as time advances. Dr. Shen, who was previously a research scientist at Meta’s Reality Labs, is an impressive addition to the entrepreneurial startup. Zhou, who previously served as a deep learning engineer at Meta, brings even more expertise to the team. The firm presently has 15 employees focused on building its proprietary technology.
Memories.ai’s solution uniquely stands apart by taking a more horizontal approach that is smart enough to play nicely with different video models. It aims to cater to two primary client sectors: marketing and security companies. The startup is addressing some of the biggest challenges related to discovery and management of video content. It eliminates wind noise in videos and compresses data to maximize efficiency and storage.
In his recent article, Dr. Shawn Shen highlights the shortcomings of current AI models when it comes to video context. He notes,
“All top AI companies, such as Google, OpenAI and Meta, are focused on producing end-to-end models. Those capabilities are good, but these models often have limitations around understanding video context beyond one or two hours.”
Like many pioneers in the field, Dr. Shen is motivated by a vision. He wants to develop an AI assistant that knows what users’ lives look like via users’ photos or smart glasses.
“But when humans use visual memory, we sift through a large context of data. We were inspired by this and wanted to build a solution to understand video across many hours better.”
The funding will go towards adding technological muscle to the company. It will address privacy concerns over the storage of video data. Sam Campbell, an investor from Susa Ventures, highlights this aspect:
“One thing we liked about Memories.ai is that it could do a lot of on-device computing. That means you don’t necessarily need to store video data in the cloud. This can unlock better security applications for people who are apprehensive of putting security cameras in their house because of privacy concerns.”
Misha Gordon-Rowe, another investor involved in the funding round, commends Dr. Shen’s technical expertise:
“Shen is a highly technical founder, and he is obsessed with pushing boundaries of video understanding and intelligence.” He further notes that Memories.ai fills a critical gap in the market for long-context visual intelligence:
“Memories.ai can unlock a lot of first-party visual intelligence data with its solution. We felt that there was a gap in the market for long context visual intelligence, which attracted us to invest in the company.”
Memories.ai is currently continuing to push the boundaries of its technology. The startup plans to expand its technology’s capabilities to be used for marketing and security purposes. By leveraging its proprietary tech stack and models for analysis, the company positions itself to meet the growing demand for sophisticated video understanding tools.