In the meantime, we'd like to do a feature here now on Veritone and Ryan Steelberg's with us, CEO and chairman of the board of Veritone. Thank you for being with us.
So tell us a little bit about the company for someone who may not be as well versed on Veritone.
Well, we're a 10-year-old AI company, which is an interesting statement to start with. Yes, that's true. We started this company right after our tenures at Google to really go out and tackle the sheer magnitude of unstructured data, audio and video, which is a major problem in every sector that we're seeing. But we initially started primarily in media and entertainment, helping media companies like NBC Universal, ESPN, Sony Pictures help them ingest and understand what's inside their content leveraging AI. That's how the business started, and it's been an exciting growth story for the business. We have a few thousand customers today. And I think more recently, which is really interesting, is we parlay that approach into the public sector. So we're now working with state and local law enforcement agencies and the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice.
Yeah, I definitely do want to talk about that. We promoted that earlier because certainly very notable. Just to stick to the kinds of customers that you've had thus far, the few thousand customers prior to getting involved with the government in some of these key things that you're working on now. I mean, the kinds of customers you mentioned Universal and some of the media type names, is that the main customer base? What else would be in the customer base?
It's mostly those in the media and entertainment space, so sports teams and sports franchises, tent pole events like the US Open, The Masters Golf Tournament, a lot of broadcasters, ad-supported groups like iHeartMedia, Beasley Broadcasting, and the like. And then studios like Amblin Entertainment, Sony Pictures, so kind of the full gamut for media and entertainment.
How do we enter into this area with Department of Defense, Department of Justice? Because now we're looking at law enforcement and safety, and the concern, and this is a big deal. I mean, so fearful when you think about what could be, right?
It started with inbound DARPA from the government. They reached out to us and were really interested in what we were doing at scale with audio and video. Very simply, could we apply that to the federal government? They are obviously producing a lot of drone footage, satellite footage, so there's a tonnage of unstructured data problem. But very quickly we saw the same problem for state and local law enforcement: body cameras, dash cams, drone footage. What do you do with all that? Where do you store it? How do you make any use of it? Is it just going to sit there in a hard drive, or is somebody going to go through it and analyze it? So a lot of the exact same technologies that we were applying for media and entertainment assets was a perfect extension for us to take the business into the public sector.
Very interesting because we talk about data storage, what to do with all this stuff, but you could start to find trends. I mean, if you're using satellites that the government is using to see grass, water areas, what's happening. For the body cams, you might get some trends on how things are going, right? I mean, are there any takeaways yet on some of this?
I think this migration started with cloud adoption, right? We needed cheap storage and cheaper compute, which has happened with the hyperscalers. Then the AI revolution, we needed powerful infrastructures, Nvidia, the chips. Now we're really at the software side. So now I think the freeway is there. We have the capabilities and technology to analyze a tremendous amount of data that makes it practical. So now, back to your analogy, if I'm trying to track oil tankers and how they're floating in the ocean across the seas, we now have the capacity to ingest and analyze thousands and thousands of hours of content very, very quickly to discern and make assumptions or get better analysis from that.
Combating human trafficking, I mean, that's terrible. Thank you for doing that. I mean, it's such... and we've seen that growing.
Yes, we have a solution. One of our applications is called Track, very simply, and it allows us to basically track people of interest, whether it's using biometric markers like your face, or in jurisdictions where you're not allowed to do that, across cameras. We kind of call it our Jason Bourne app. But again, human trafficking and trying to find those dangerous situations or people of interest is one of the key use cases.
I still want to talk about the future and what the plans are and the agenda, but one more really critical is campus security. As a mom who has two boys at two separate colleges, both of whom were in shelter in place at different times for an active shooter, it's just awful. Another use case that I didn't really foresee when we launched this. Yes, I understand police officers when doing a stop or something, but we have dozens of universities now. It's a problem. And if there are cameras and audio and video capture or citizen upload, we're there to help them now that we can actually do stuff. So campus security is a new client base for us as well.
Sure, sure. So law enforcement, campus security, human trafficking. I can almost see this going into almost every venue, right? I mean, whether it's malls or theaters. I mean, every time I go to the movie theater, I've got to tell you, I'm still nervous because I remember when we've had attacks in the movie theater. When I used to take my son when they were young in first grade, with their friends, I would sit on one end, my husband or my mom would sit on the other, and we'd put all the kids in the middle because there were some bad things that happened in movie theaters. So do you foresee this on the agenda for theaters, for malls, for what else?
