Wasabi Acquires Curio AI for AI-Powered Intelligent Storage

Wasabi, the "hot cloud" storage provider, is buying Curio AI from GrayMeta.

The acquisition includes both Curio AI's intellectual property and personnel, including GrayMeta CEO Aaron Edell, who will join Wasabi as senior vice president of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Wasabi will incorporate Curio AI technology into a new class of AI-powered intelligent storage for the media and entertainment industry. That will debut this spring.

Curio AI is an intelligent data platform that uses AI to generate metadata for media libraries, and allows editors and producers to search and retrieve specific media segments based on people, places, events, emotions, logos, landmarks, background audio and more. Curio AI can also detect and transcribe speech in over 50 spoken languages.

Wasabi isn’t saying how much it's paying for Curio AI.

Wasabi with Curio AI Provides 'One-of-a-Kind' Offering

Whit Jackson, Wasabi’s vice president of media and entertainment, said this acquisition allows partners to provide a “one-of-a-kind offering” that simplifies workflows in a cost-effective way from a company that customers already know as innovative and trustworthy.

“This becomes another new product that partners can offer and gives them the ability to compete in the AI space, which they are not currently able to do,” he said. “We anticipate a really positive response from our channel once we have the opportunity to share with them as this will provide major upside for their current business.”

As the industry’s first AI-powered intelligent cloud storage, this acquisition gives partners a unique competitive edge since no other storage company is offering a product like it, Jackson said.

“For many, cloud storage and AI are two separate offerings,” he said. “With Curio AI integrated with Wasabi’s hot cloud storage, partners can offer their customers a simplified, all-in-one package of storage and intelligent AI.”

Capability Critical for Wasabi Customers

The integration of Curio AI with Wasabi offers customers the capability to sift through troves of their video archives, retrieve the footage they need in real time, and bring it to the market immediately, Jackson said.

Wasabi's Whit Jackson

“This capability is critical for Wasabi customers in the media and entertainment space, such as pro sports teams, Hollywood studios, and television and broadcast networks who store hundreds of exabytes of video,” he said. “Curio AI’s metadata helps Wasabi customers quickly and affordably identify the specific content or sentiment of an asset without slowing down production. Instead, they can more easily monetize their content and reap the benefits of AI and next-generation storage architecture.”

The Curio AI team will continue to support partners and customers as “we transition to our new, innovative way of delivering ML tagging and other capabilities to customers with large media libraries,” Jackson said.

“With this new bundled storage offering, we are able to now provide these customers the opportunity to easily offload growing video archives currently on premises to the cloud,” he added.