IRIS.TV

Founded in 2013 by Field Garthwaite and Richie Hyden, IRIS.TV has established itself as a significant player in the video data platform space. The company's genesis lies in the founders' ambition to empower media companies with the same level of sophisticated, data-driven content programming, packaging, and activation capabilities that major platforms like Google, Amazon, and Netflix utilize. CEO Field Garthwaite brought his experience from the advertising and media sectors, having worked at companies like Rubicon Project, while COO Richie Hyden contributed his expertise in product development and engineering. This combination of commercial and technical acumen has been central to the company's trajectory.

IRIS.TV operates as a video data platform, providing critical infrastructure for the advertising ecosystem. Its primary function is to analyze video content at the frame-by-frame level, using computer vision and artificial intelligence to generate a deep understanding of the video's context. This contextual data is then standardized and made available to advertisers and publishers. The company serves a broad range of clients, including publishers, broadcasters, and ad tech platforms, enabling them to offer brand-safe and contextually relevant advertising without relying on personal identifiers or cookies. The business model is centered on licensing its data and platform, generating revenue by charging fees for access to its contextual intelligence, which helps clients increase advertising revenue and viewer engagement. For instance, publishers can use the data to better package their video inventory for sale, and advertisers can use it to target their campaigns to relevant and suitable content.

The core of IRIS.TV's offering is its contextual data marketplace. This platform ingests video content from publishers and analyzes it to create standardized data segments based on various contextual signals such as keywords, content categories, and brand safety parameters defined by the IAB and GARM frameworks. This data is then passed to demand-side platforms (DSPs) and supply-side platforms (SSPs) in the programmatic advertising supply chain. A key benefit is the ability to enable advertisers to make informed decisions about where their ads appear at a granular, video-level, thus improving campaign performance and ensuring brand suitability. IRIS.TV has secured significant partnerships with major players in the digital video and advertising technology industries, including integrations with Oracle, Google, and Magnite, and has raised substantial funding to fuel its growth, including a $18 million Series B round.

Keywords: video data platform, contextual intelligence, ad tech, video advertising, brand safety, contextual targeting, programmatic advertising, content analysis, data marketplace, CTV advertising