Veritone, Inc. (VERI): History, Ownership, Mission, How It Works & Makes Money

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) is at a critical inflection point in the enterprise AI landscape, but can its proprietary aiWARE platform translate recent momentum into sustained profitability?

You're looking at a company guiding for full-year 2025 revenue between $109 million and $115 million, yet its core Software Products & Services revenue, excluding Veritone Hire, exploded by over 200% year-over-year in the third quarter of 2025, signaling a defintely strong pivot to high-margin AI software.

This growth, plus the recent October 2025 equity raise of $75 million to aggressively pay down debt, means you need to understand precisely how their AI operating system works and where that revenue is actually coming from to assess the true value of its current $376.91 million market capitalization.

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) History

Veritone, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) technology company that built its foundation on the idea of an operating system for cognitive computing, a platform called aiWARE. You need to understand this history because the company's trajectory is a clear pivot from media-focused services toward a pure-play, enterprise-grade AI software business, especially in the high-growth public sector and data monetization spaces.

Given Company's Founding Timeline

Year established

Veritone was established in 2014.

Original location

The company initially set up its roots in Newport Beach, California, before establishing its current headquarters in Irvine, California.

Founding team members

The company was founded by brothers Chad Steelberg and Ryan Steelberg, who are serial entrepreneurs. Other key founders included Patrick Lennon and Zeus Peleuses.

Initial capital/funding

While specific seed funding details remain private, Veritone secured a total of $15 million in funding over two initial rounds. A major early capital event was its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in May 2017, which raised approximately $37.5 million to fuel its expansion and technology development.

Given Company's Evolution Milestones

Given Company's Transformative Moments

The company's history is defintely marked by a few critical pivots that reshaped its financial model and focus.

The first transformative moment was the realization that the proprietary aiWARE platform-an operating system for AI-was the true core asset, not the managed services built on top of it. This led to a strategic shift to license the software directly to enterprises and the public sector, rather than just using it internally.

• Divestiture of Non-Core Assets: The company divested its media agency, Veritone One, in Q4 2024. This was a clear move to shed lower-margin, non-core businesses and focus resources entirely on the high-margin AI software and products segment.
• Public Sector Dominance: A major strategic win in 2025 was securing a sole source contract with the United States Air Force and achieving 'Awardable' status on the Department of Defense's (DoD) Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace for its Investigate solution. This positioned the company for substantial growth in the public sector, which now has a pipeline exceeding $110 million.
• The Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) Launch: The VDR launch in 2024 and its explosive growth in 2025 is the most recent game-changer. It directly addresses the exploding demand for high-quality, governed data to train generative AI models. The qualified and near-term VDR pipeline exited Q3 2025 at over $40.0 million, a 400% increase from Q1 2025.
• 2025 Capital Infusion: The completion of over $100 million in equity offerings in Q3/October 2025 was crucial. This capital was immediately put to work to pay down a significant portion of its high-interest debt, fundamentally strengthening the balance sheet and providing runway to execute the high-growth VDR and Public Sector strategies.

For a deeper dive into the company's guiding principles, you should explore the Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of Veritone, Inc. (VERI).

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) Ownership Structure

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) is primarily controlled by a mix of public retail investors, company insiders, and large institutional funds, a structure that often leads to high volatility but also aligns management incentives with shareholder returns.

Veritone, Inc.'s Current Status

Veritone, Inc. is a publicly traded company, listed on the NASDAQ Global Market under the ticker symbol VERI. As of November 2025, its market capitalization stands at approximately $376.91 million, with the stock trading around $3.96 per share. The company's status as a public entity means its governance is subject to SEC regulations, but its ownership concentration is a key factor in strategic decisions.

The high proportion of insider and retail ownership, compared to some of its peers, means company strategy is defintely influenced by the long-term vision of its founders and the sentiment of a large, diverse base of individual investors. For a deeper dive into the company's long-term goals, you can check out the Mission Statement, Vision, & Core Values of Veritone, Inc. (VERI).

Veritone, Inc.'s Ownership Breakdown

The company's ownership structure as of the 2025 fiscal year highlights a significant stake held by company insiders, which is a crucial point for investors to consider. Here's the quick math on who owns the shares:

What this estimate hides is the potential influence of the insider group, whose 32.64% stake gives them a powerful voice in shareholder votes, even though the public holds the majority of shares. For example, Vanguard Group, Inc. and BlackRock, Inc. are among the top institutional holders, demonstrating a degree of confidence from major financial players.

Veritone, Inc.'s Leadership

The company is steered by an experienced leadership team, with co-founder Ryan Steelberg at the helm. Their long tenure suggests a consistent strategic direction, which is important for a company navigating the rapidly evolving enterprise AI space.

• Ryan S. Steelberg: Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chairman of the Board. He co-founded the company in 2014 and has over 25 years of executive management experience.
• Mike Zemetra: Chief Financial Officer (CFO). He brings extensive financial leadership, including experience in SaaS and public sectors.
• Craig Gatarz: Chief Legal Officer. He oversees all corporate law and legal affairs, with over 25 years in the field.
• Julie Harding: Chief People Officer. She leads the people-centric strategy and organizational excellence initiatives.
• Ben Xiang: SVP of Corporate Development & Strategy and GM of aiWARE™. He oversees the AI Solutions group and product development for the proprietary AI operating system.

The board of directors, which includes members like Michael Keithley and Michael Zilis, provides oversight and strategic guidance, blending technology and financial expertise to manage the company's growth. The average tenure of the management team is around 2.5 years, but the CEO's tenure is significantly longer, at over 8.7 years, providing stability.

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) Mission and Values

Veritone, Inc.'s core purpose extends beyond its enterprise AI platform, aiWARE, focusing on ethical technology deployment to improve society. Its cultural DNA is built on a mission to democratize artificial intelligence (AI) and ensure its use is responsible, transparent, and empowering.

Veritone, Inc.'s Core Purpose

You're looking at a company trying to balance rapid AI innovation with a strong ethical framework, which is defintely a challenge in this market. Veritone, Inc. is clear that its technology, while driving efficiency, must ultimately advance human potential.

Official mission statement

The company's formal mission is a bold statement about its long-term societal goals, not just its market position.

• To democratize artificial intelligence and build a safer, more vibrant, transparent, and just world.

This mission is grounded in real-world application, like its public sector work where the company is targeting a 100% to 150% revenue growth for fiscal year 2025 by providing solutions that aid law enforcement and government agencies. We're talking about a tech company that wants to be a force for good, not just profit.

Vision statement

Veritone, Inc.'s vision is centered on establishing its proprietary AI operating system, aiWARE, as the foundational technology that orchestrates machine learning models across all industries.

• Establish aiWARE as the core operating system for AI, driving innovation and actionable intelligence across media, public sector, and talent acquisition.
• Advance human potential by blending human expertise with AI technology to help organizations achieve more than ever before.

This vision is a practical roadmap for how they plan to move from a Q3 2025 non-GAAP net loss of $5.8 million to sustained profitability, by focusing on a scalable platform model. For a deeper dive into the financial implications of this strategy, you should check out Breaking Down Veritone, Inc. (VERI) Financial Health: Key Insights for Investors.

Veritone, Inc. Core Principles ('AI for Good')

The company's cultural DNA is defined by its 'AI for Good' initiative, which outlines four non-negotiable principles for all its products, from the Veritone Data Refinery to its public safety solutions. These are the guardrails for their technology.

• Transparency: Ensuring the technology is explainable and reliable, avoiding the 'black box' problem.
• Trust: Building confidence by adhering to ethical standards and auditing for bias, especially in recruitment technology.
• Security and Compliance: Upholding the highest standards to protect assets and ensure the responsible use of data.
• Empowerment: Designing solutions that augment human capabilities, allowing staff to do more with less.

This commitment is crucial, especially as the company is guiding for Q4 2025 revenue between $33.4 million and $39.4 million, with a higher mix of data-intensive services that require absolute trust. The focus on these principles is a strategic move to differentiate in a crowded AI market, plus it helps secure critical public sector contracts.

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) How It Works

Veritone, Inc. operates as a crucial link between the massive volume of unstructured data-things like audio, video, and text-and the intelligence needed to act on it. Its core business is transforming this raw, messy information into structured, AI-ready assets using its proprietary artificial intelligence operating system, aiWARE.

Veritone's Product/Service Portfolio

The company's revenue is primarily driven by its Software Products and Services segment, which grew by an impressive 55.5% year-over-year in Q3 2025 to $22.8 million. This growth highlights the market's increasing reliance on their specialized AI applications.

Veritone's Operational Framework

The operational process is built around a clear, three-step value chain: ingest, process, and apply. The company's strategic focus in 2025 has been a sharp pivot toward a pure software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, which you can read more about in Exploring Veritone, Inc. (VERI) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

This shift is defintely showing up in the numbers, with SaaS revenue representing 73% of total Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in Q3 2025. They are making money through software licensing fees, consumption-based usage for data processing, and professional services for custom integration.

• Data Ingestion: Raw, unstructured data (like body-cam footage, call center recordings, or broadcast content) is fed into the aiWARE platform.
• Cognitive Processing: aiWARE orchestrates a mix of proprietary and third-party machine learning models-vision, speech, natural language processing-to analyze the data and extract metadata (e.g., transcribing audio, identifying objects).
• Application & Automation: The resulting structured, actionable intelligence is delivered via purpose-built applications like iDEMS or VDR, automating workflows and enabling decisions for the end-user.
• Cost Discipline: The company executed cost-cutting and restructuring initiatives in 2025, aiming for up to $10 million in annualized savings to improve financial health.

Here's the quick math: the full-year 2025 revenue is projected to be between $109 million and $115 million, a solid increase from the prior year, but the company is still guiding for a non-GAAP net loss between $31.6 million and $26.0 million. They're focused on growth, but still burning cash.

Veritone's Strategic Advantages

Veritone's market success hinges on its ability to offer an open, unified AI ecosystem, not just a single tool. This interoperability is a huge competitive edge in a fragmented AI landscape.

• Platform Agnostic AI (aiWARE): Unlike competitors that lock you into their own models, aiWARE lets customers switch between different AI engines based on performance or cost, which minimizes vendor lock-in risk.
• Public Sector Momentum: A significant strategic win was the sole-source contract with the U.S. Air Force to deploy aiWARE and iDEMS, validating their solutions for the high-security, high-spend government market.
• Data Tokenization Leadership: The Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) positions the company to capitalize on the growing demand for high-quality, AI-ready training data-a critical, high-margin market.
• De-risked Balance Sheet: The company completed a major financial cleanup in 2025, paying down 100% of its senior secured term debt and approximately 50% of its convertible notes, which simplifies the capital structure.

What this estimate hides is that the shift to higher-margin software is a multi-year effort, but the Q3 2025 non-GAAP net loss improved by 47.8% year-over-year to $5.8 million, so the strategy is working.

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) How It Makes Money

Veritone, Inc. primarily makes money by selling enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) software and services, built on its core operating system, aiWARE. The revenue model is a classic Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) structure, blending predictable subscription fees with high-growth, consumption-based pricing tied directly to customer data usage and processing volume.

You're seeing a classic strategic pivot here: the company is shedding its legacy low-margin services to focus entirely on its high-margin AI software. That's the whole story.

Veritone, Inc.'s Revenue Breakdown

The company's revenue streams in the third quarter of 2025 (Q3 2025) clearly show this shift, with Software Products and Services driving the vast majority of the top line. Total revenue for Q3 2025 was $29.1 million, an increase of 32.4% year-over-year.

Here's the quick math: Software Products and Services brought in $22.8 million in Q3 2025, while the Managed Services segment contributed $6.3 million. The core AI software business grew 55.5%, but if you strip out the slower-growing Veritone Hire unit, that core AI software growth jumps to over 200% year-over-year.

Business Economics

Veritone's financial engine is built on two key economic fundamentals: high gross margins from its AI platform and the shift toward consumption-based revenue. This is how they scale without the costs of a traditional services firm.

• Pricing Structure: The Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), which hit $68.8 million as of Q3 2025, is a mix of subscription-based SaaS (Software as a Service) and consumption-based models. About 73% of that ARR comes from the more predictable subscription-based revenue.
• Consumption-Driven Growth: The fastest growth is coming from consumption-based customers, whose ARR increased 26% year-over-year in Q3 2025. This is a powerful lever, as customer success directly translates to higher usage and therefore more revenue.
• High Gross Margin: The non-GAAP gross margin for Q3 2025 was a strong 70.6%, which is typical for a scalable software business and shows the high profitability of their core AI products.
• Key Growth Driver: The Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) is the new growth engine, focused on tokenizing and monetizing unstructured data. The qualified bookings and near-term pipeline for VDR exited Q3 2025 at over $40.0 million, a massive 400% increase from Q1 2025 estimates.

The high non-GAAP gross margin shows they are defintely selling a valuable product. You can read more about the institutional interest in Exploring Veritone, Inc. (VERI) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?

Veritone, Inc.'s Financial Performance

While the revenue mix is improving, the company is still in a high-growth, pre-profitability phase, which means losses are narrowing but still present. The focus is on improving operational efficiency while aggressively growing the core AI business.

• Operational Improvement: The operating loss for Q3 2025 was $15.8 million, which is a significant improvement of 29.7% compared to the same quarter last year. This is a direct result of strategic cost reduction initiatives, which are expected to provide annualized savings of up to $10.0 million.
• Net Loss: The non-GAAP net loss from continuing operations for Q3 2025 was $5.8 million, an improvement of 47.8% year-over-year. This is the number to watch, as it shows the path to profitability.
• Full-Year Outlook: Management guided for full-year 2025 revenue between $109 million and $115 million. They project the full-year non-GAAP net loss to be between $31.6 million and $26.0 million, a substantial improvement over fiscal 2024.
• Balance Sheet Action: The company completed over $100 million in equity capital transactions in Q3 2025, which allowed them to pay down 100% of their senior secured term debt. This dramatically lowers the financial risk profile.

What this estimate hides is the one-time, non-cash charge of $8.0 million in Q3 2025 related to the estimated fair value of an earnout from the Veritone One divestiture, which artificially inflated the GAAP net loss but doesn't impact core operations. Focus on the non-GAAP numbers; they tell the real story of the operating business.

Veritone, Inc. (VERI) Market Position & Future Outlook

Veritone is in the middle of a strategic pivot, transforming from a diversified services provider into a pure-play enterprise Artificial Intelligence (AI) software company, with its future hinged on the success of its aiWARE platform and the high-growth Veritone Data Refinery (VDR) initiative. The company projects full-year 2025 revenue between $109 million and $115 million, an implied year-over-year increase of about 21% at the midpoint, suggesting its focus on core AI software is beginning to gain traction, but it still faces a challenging path to profitability, which management targets for the latter part of 2026.

Competitive Landscape

You have to be a realist: Veritone operates in the shadow of AI giants, but its competitive edge lies in its niche focus and the unique architecture of its AI operating system, aiWARE. This platform orchestrates various machine learning models-not just its own-making it incredibly flexible for customers dealing with complex, unstructured data like audio and video. The table below shows the scale difference, which is the key challenge. Since direct market share for this specific enterprise AI niche is hard to pinpoint, I'm using a proxy based on their relevant market presence and scale in the enterprise and government AI sectors.

Opportunities & Challenges

The near-term is about execution. Veritone has cleared significant financial hurdles, but now it must convert its pipeline into recurring revenue to hit that 2026 profitability goal. The opportunities are clear, but the risks are defintely material.

Industry Position

Veritone is a small-cap, high-beta player in the massive enterprise AI sector, positioning itself as the AI infrastructure layer for unstructured data rather than a general-purpose tool. Its strength is its focus, which is a double-edged sword.

• aiWARE (AI Operating System): Its core platform is a differentiator, designed to be open and extensible, which allows clients to plug in various machine learning models easily, a crucial feature in the fast-moving AI landscape.
• Public Sector Niche Dominance: Veritone has carved out a strong position in the government and regulated industries with its iDEMS and Investigate solutions, securing 'Awardable' status on key federal procurement vehicles like DoD Tradewinds.
• Revenue Mix Shift: The company is deliberately shifting its revenue mix toward higher-margin Software Products and Services, which grew over 200% year-over-year in Q3 2025 (excluding Veritone Hire), while Managed Services revenue declined.

The market has a 'Moderate Buy' consensus rating from Wall Street analysts, with a predicted upside of 152.53% based on 12-month forecasts, suggesting confidence in its turnaround if execution remains strong. You can dig deeper into the institutional view here: Exploring Veritone, Inc. (VERI) Investor Profile: Who's Buying and Why?