Artificial intelligence (AI) powered video search firm Valossa Labs Oy has raised a $650,000 seed round that included Butterfly Ventures and several Finnish angel investors.

Founded in September this year by a development team of Ph.D.’s, graduate students and M.Sc.’s from the University of Oulu in Finland, Valossa is developing what it describes as groundbreaking AI- and voice-powered deep content video search technology.

The company’s main platform is a descriptive search engine for video which enables natural, verbose and flexible querying for voice-controlled movie services and entertainment platforms; think Siri in Apple’s latest Apple TV but with far better AI functionality, including the ability to understand abstract queries such as “show me romantic comedy movies involving career issues and family.”

Valossa’s technology enables automated scene descriptive metadata creation for content production, real-time video content discovery applications and contextual advertising through the ability of being able to analyze video streams in real-time, including being able to identify more than one thousand concepts (places and objects) from any video stream.

The technology is said to actually understand the content of video files themselves through a combination of natural language processing and pattern recognition AI, delivering the ability for users to reach down into their video content, identify it and make it searchable.

Example queries understood by Valossa Search provided in details sent to SiliconANGLE include:

• Sean Connery in red pants
• scifi movies about space battles and laser guns
• Eastwood protecting the president
• comedy in Hawaii
• nonviolent princess movies
• romantic comedy movies involving career issues and family

The company has a demo site at www.whatismymovie.com that currently contains data on more than 45,000 English language movies, demonstrating the potential of what they have already achieved in their ongoing development.

Fascinating

The possibilities offered by Valossa’s platform are fascinating to say the least, and even it’s demo site is kind of fun in and of itself; there’s no question that what they are building is the next generation of AI-powered video search and the depth of which the service is able to analyze video, even in real time, is something nearly in the realms of science fiction as it is soo much more advanced that what we have today.

Although it is early days for the company so far we’d predict if they don’t get acquired first (this is a company offering a technology the likes of Apple and Google will want to own) they have the potential to go on to big things.

Image credit: Valossa/screenshot.