Equals 3, the Minneapolis tech startup developing artificial intelligence-powered marketing tools, announced last week that its platform, called Lucy, has several new capabilities surrounding video.
Equals 3 created Lucy three years ago as a web-based software program that mines data to generate market research. The company targets Fortune 1000 companies with its product, which is designed to create audience insights, research and predictive media modeling.
"But there's a lot more that Lucy is capable of doing," Equals 3 Co-Founder and Managing Partner Scott Litman told Minne Inno.
Videos have been difficult information sources to search. The consequence of this, Litman says, is "dark data," internal knowledge that goes unused or gets lost over time.
"Large companies manage a lot of data. There's a lot of information out there," Litman said. "If a document hasn't been opened in 90 days, there's a good chance it won't be touched again."
Over the past several months, Equals 3 has been developing a fix for video searches. Lucy users can now unearth data from videos by simply typing a question in a search box and finding the specific answer within the video. Lucy also transcribes the video and is capable of identifying faces in the video.
So instead of rewatching an entire 30-minute video to answer one question, users can ask Lucy a question and she will direct them to the exact time in the video when that topic is addressed.
Lucy has been performing similar searches on internal documents, servers and more than 20 different file systems for some time. But Litman said the company was driven by customer demand to bring the same capabilities to video.
Litman founded Equals 3 in 2016 with Dan Mallin about four months after they sold their tech consultancy business Magnet 360 to India-based Mindtree in a deal worth up to $50 million. The company quickly raised $1 million from angel investors and followed that with a $6 million just a few months later.
Litman and Mallin also started Minnesota Cup, the state's largest startup competition, in 2005.
Lucy is an "offspring" of IBM's Watson, a supercomputer that uses machine learning to mine massive amounts of data. The computer is named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson. Equals 3's founders named their platform one of his granddaughters, Lucinda Watson.
Since Equals 3 launched Lucy in 2016, it has grown from three founders to around 30 people spread across its three offices in Minneapolis, New York and Bangalore. The company reports that it had a 139 percent increase in sales last year.
"A year ago, it was harder to find adoption, but after we started focusing on unstructured data, the sales cycle sped up," Litman said. "Lucy gets better every day."
