Clarify, an Austin-based startup offering a platform for audio and video search and analytics announced today that it has closed a $1 million seed financing with enthusiastic participation from Projector Ventures and Silverton Partners, and additional notable support from Austin-based Blake Chandlee together with several other early Facebook executives; Michael Rauchman, a pioneer in electronic trading; Brett Hurt, the founder of Coremetrics and Bazaarvoice; and Sam Decker, a founder of Mass Relevance (now Spredfast) and now a Clarify Board Member. The primary use of funds will be to continue to engineer the core platform, support early customers, and grow in key markets.
The Clarify platform allows developers to embed audio and video search directly into their mobile and web applications with a few lines of code. The platform ingests media files, extracts their contents, and then indexes both the spoken words and any metadata associated with the media. A powerful search interface allows developers to discover when particular words were spoken. This capability is critical in a wide range of applications in fields such as telecom, financial services and education.
According to Paul Murphy, Clarify's co-founder and CEO, 'The Clarify team is thrilled to secure this funding so that we can continue to expand our platform and introduce new capabilities to developers and businesses throughout the United States. We are especially proud that Austin has embraced Clarify with open arms. Two-thirds of our funding is from Austin, with additional funds coming from Chicago, Silicon Valley, New York, and London.'
Kip McClanahan, Partner at Silverton further elaborated, 'When we invest, we look for two things: exciting technology and a massive market opportunity. Clarify delivers on both.'
'Clarify has an opportunity to become a high-value API platform for extracting insights from audio and video content,' said Leonid Sagalovsky, Ph.D., Managing Partner at Projector. 'We are pleased to support this team of seasoned entrepreneurs, world-class scientists and talented engineers with our investment. Also, we are happy that the vibrant hi-tech Austin ecosystem gets another cool, well-funded startup in its midst.'
The Clarify platform launched in September 2014. To date, over 400 companies have signed up to build on the Clarify API.
About Projector Ventures:
Projector Ventures is a boutique investment partnership focusing on early-stage IT startups in US and Europe. Projector is based in Palo Alto, Berkeley, Chicago, London and Yekaterinburg and looks for companies that apply technology to solve fundamental problems. Projector can be reached at p@pv.vc.
About Silverton Partners:
Silverton Partners is an early stage venture capital firm based in Austin, Texas. Silverton collaborates with exceptional entrepreneurs who are committed to attacking growth markets with proprietary products or services. The principals of Silverton Partners have over five decades of venture experience, having been the startup investors in Tivoli Systems (IPO), Silicon Labs (IPO), Motive Communications (IPO), Waveset (acquired by Sun Microsystems) and BlackLocus (acquired by The Home Depot). More information on Silverton Partners can be found at http://www.silvertonpartners.com.
About Clarify Inc:
Clarify Inc. was founded in June 2014, in Austin, Texas, to give developers access to speech, video, and language technologies. These are accessed through easy-to-use APIs. Today, the platform enables the embedding of media search and analytics into any web site or application. The founding team has participated in Accenture's Fintech Innovation Lab in London, TechStars, and the BBC Media Labs. Clarify is a member of the Capital Factory in Austin.