Montréal-based deep tech startup Botni.Vision, which goes by Rivr, has secured approximately $2.5 million USD ($3.6 million CAD) in seed funding from Toronto’s GreenSky Ventures to commercialize its flagship in-media search and content discovery software.
With Rivr, the company aims to make it easier for creators and brands to review the deluge of video content they produce and determine what audiences find the most engaging.
“Being able to search based on that emotion is really powerful.”
Neil Peet,
GreenSky
As interest in video-based social media has grown, so has the demand for software to analyze those videos, Rivr co-founder and CEO Brandon Weinman-Tyre argued in an interview with BetaKit. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when people expect the same level of understanding that we have outside of video, inside of video,” he said.
With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), Rivr ingests multimedia content such as gaming videos, podcasts, live events, workshops, and interviews on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, and converts that into data that clients can search and analyze for highlights and insights without the need to spend as much time rewatching source material themselves.
Rivr sees applications for creators looking to improve their content, capitalize on popular moments, and report back to partners, as well as brands trying to evaluate existing relationships with streamers and what content resonates with audiences.
To start, Rivr is focusing on the gaming content creation industry, where it is already serving enterprise clients like Amazon Games, Bungie, Epic Games, and Logitech. The startup’s software is currently available to streamers and other individuals in early access.
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The company’s convertible note seed financing closed in February, and brings its total funding to about $4 million USD ($5.4 million CAD). Rivr has been using this funding to grow its team and refine and commercialize its platform.
Rivr was founded in 2020 by Weinman-Tyre and “chief Xperience officer” Marc Singer, a pair of childhood best friends who previously helped develop video games themselves.
According to Weinman-Tyre, the initial version of Rivr was a vision system, which generated some early traction, but the company soon realized that they were solving a slightly different problem—not just the ability to search videos, but the capacity to discover moments and portions that resonated with audiences inside those videos.
“Search is good, but the experiences that really dominate the internet are discovery,” he said.
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Given that, the startup set to work on turning Rivr into a video search tool that helps clients find and better understand some of those experiences. Part of the goal, Weinman-Tyre said, is to help creators and brands “discover magic things that are happening in the wild, versus going and trying to manufacture them.”
“[Rivr] makes it very easy to search for media that provokes reactions for humans, so things that are exciting, that are scary, that are funny, those types of reactions tend to be where the most signals or noise happen, and those anomalies are very easy for the platform to find,” GreenSky partner Neil Peet told BetaKit in an interview.
Peet said that Rivr’s capacity to do this better than more traditional pattern-matching search tools means the company’s tech can also be used to search for highlights that evoke experiences in not just gaming, but also sports, music, and podcast videos.
“Being able to search based on that emotion is really powerful,” Peet said. “That just doesn’t exist right now.”
Feature image courtesy Rivr.