Valossa’s Patent Pending Descriptive Video Search Technology Raises $650 000

    Want to find scifi-movies that are only about space battles and laser guns for the holiday season?

    Oulu-based startup Valossa announces closing a $650 000 seed round with Butterfly ventures and several Finnish angel investors. The company’s flagship platform, Valossa Smart Search, is a descriptive search engine for video, that brings natural query understanding to a depth never seen before in commercial on-demand movie services.

    Designed for service and content providers – by a development team of Ph.D.’s, graduate students and M.Sc.’s from the University of Oulu in Northern Finland – Valossa can reach down into video content, identify it and make it searchable.

    The company’s demo website whatismymovie.com contains data on more than 45,000 English language movies, and the technology has been tested with a Finnish online TV-service since 2010.

    The Holistic Searching Experience?

    Valossa Search enables natural, verbose and flexible querying for entertainment platforms and voice-controlled movie services. It is based on the company’s patent-pending, unique deep content models that are constructed from various descriptive movie data sources from all over the internet.

    The technology understands the content of video files through a combination of natural language processing and pattern recognition AI – and it is capable of analyzing video streams in real-time to identify more than one thousand concepts, such as places and objects, from any video stream. This enables automated scene descriptive metadata creation for content production, real-time video content discovery applications and contextual advertising.

    In addition to Valossa Search, the company’s technology platform has also the capability for video stream analysis of live television for example. Through this feature, holistic video content descriptions can be produced at a scene level alongside descriptive keyword annotation for video overviews.

    Last but not least, Valossa is also polishing at the moment new technologies that will be integrated into its platform which include analyzing TV transcripts for emotional sentiment and detecting emotions from human faces.

    This combination makes Valossa absolutely one of the most interesting startup coming from the region at the moment. The company also won this June Midnight Pitch Fest pitching competition arranged in Oulu and started their operations in California – so probably there will also be big news coming up for the company in 2016.