The recent hit piece on Veritone at Seeking Alpha, "Veritone: A Really Poor Man's Palantir" is authored by Contrarian PM dated December 1. I don't have a premium subscription to SA,so I cant review it now, but I read the article when it came out and commented on it. It was very similar to the occasional hit pieces by Gary Alexander. Each hit piece at some point in the article argues that Veritone is "not really an AI company." They typically attribute that to 2 things. 1. Veritone does not have a lot of patents that are specific to "AI". 2. Veritones aiWARE SAAS revenues are still not very significant at 3.4 million last quarter.
This latest article calls Veritone an "AI pretender".
They never say what qualifies to meet their definition of what "AI" IP is. If Veritone's patents consisted entirely of IP on various algorithms, would that satisfy them? They don't say what meets their threshold to be considered an "AI company".
From what I see, although I am far from being any expert on IP, Veritone acquired significant IP from Atigeo back in 2017, and this is the source of their CDI IP. They have continued to develop this, and have filed and obtained several follow-on patents concerning CDI and applying it to battery control. These are the patents that support the recently announced Energy vertical and the various solutions that Veritone offers.
They have integrated this CDI technology with their aiWARE platform.
One can go to their website to learn about CDI technology, as well as the advantages of the aiWARE platform. As far as IP for aiWARE, it is my understanding that it primarily concerns the orchestration of AI engines.
So my thought on the recent hit piece as well as the prior hit pieces is that they are just that. "Hit pieces". They don't want to acknowledge that Veritone has IP. They don't acknowledge that Veritone has (perhaps until now) been a self described development stage company with a land and expand strategy. They criticize the lack of meaningful aiWARE revenues, but don't acknowledge that Veritone has never targeted a current generation AI point solution market.
All that being said. They are correct in the current AI revenues from Veritone are not that great. Veritone touts numerous big name partners and customers, but all these customers and partners currently are only able to generate 3.4 million in aiWARE revenue for Veritone. So they have a point, but they like to drive that point home rather than give any attention to the fact that Veritone has always focused on positioning for the future. Land and Expand.
It's up to Veritone to execute, and put an end to these articles that call them an AI pretender. To me, it reminds me of the old days when IBM was the dominant PC company. Then Microsoft came along with an operating system. It would be the same if Seeking Alpha authors had criticized young Microsoft for not being a "real computer company." So you should stick with IBM and dump Microsoft because IBM is a "real" computer company and has all the patents.
So, the article is shortsighted in my opinion, but there is no getting around it, Veritone certainly comes with risk. But its just my opinion that they do have IP to consider, and do have opportunities to do great things. In my opinion, Veritone has done a great job "landing", now is the time for them to demonstrate that they are "expanding". That's where we are right now, so we'll see.
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