Samsung has invested in Memories.ai, an early-stage startup building powerful video analysis tools.
The company recently raised $8 million in seed funding led by Susa Ventures, with participation from Samsung Next, Fusion Fund, Crane Ventures, Seedcamp, and Creator Ventures.
The startup’s selling point is providing an AI tool that can process and understand up to 10 million hours of video.
This solves a major issue: making long-form video searchable and useful.
Today’s Video AI
Most video AI tools today can handle short clips. They can detect objects or summarize scenes; however, they struggle with footage that spans many hours or even multiple days.
This is a significant limitation for sectors such as security and marketing. Security teams are tasked with reviewing hours of surveillance footage from various cameras.
Marketers often analyze dozens of video campaigns to identify trends, but without proper tools, both tasks require long manual reviews.
Memories.ai remedies this by providing searchable indexing, tagging, segmentation, and data aggregation for video.
It lets users ask complex questions across large video datasets and receive relevant, context-aware results.
Experienced Founders
The company’s leadership has strong technical experience. Co-founder Dr. Shawn Shen worked as a research scientist at Meta’s Reality Labs while pursuing his PhD.
His co-founder, Enmin (Ben) Zhou, was also at Meta, where he worked as a machine learning engineer.
According to Shen, most AI companies today focus on building end-to-end models. These models are useful but have limited ability to understand long-form video context.
“In contrast, humans process visual information over time,” Shen explained. “We wanted to create an AI that can do the same.”
The Workings
Memories.ai uses a technology stack and processes video in several steps. It first filters out the noise in the footage and stores the significant moments.
Then, it indexes the sifted moments and provides a summary. The result is a system that understands long videos and lets users search them using plain-language queries.
For example, users could ask: “Show me interviews from last week,” and the system would deliver accurate results.
Use Cases
At the moment, Memories.ai targets two industries: marketing and security. Marketers use the platform to analyze social media videos, review past campaigns, and identify content trends.
It also includes basic tools for video creation. Security companies, on the other hand, use it to review surveillance footage. The AI can detect patterns, recognize suspicious behavior, and help teams act faster.
Also read: Why AI Security Should Start with Access Management
Samsung’s Interest
Samsung Next, the company’s investment arm, sees significant potential. It highlights Memories.ai’s ability to run processing on-device.
This means users may not need to upload their footage to the cloud. According to Sam Campbell, a partner at Samsung Next, this could solve privacy concerns for consumers.
Many are reluctant to use home security cameras because they worry about storing video data online. Edge computing offers a more private alternative.
Future Plans
Today, companies must upload their video archives for analysis. However, the startup plans to introduce shared drives and real-time syncing. This will make it easier for users to manage their content.
The team also plans to build an AI assistant. This assistant could use personal videos, photos, or smart glasses to help users recall information or automate tasks.
In the long term, the technology could support uses such as training robots or enhancing navigation for self-driving cars.
Competition
Memories.ai faces competition from startups like mem0 and Letta. These companies are also working on video memory layers for AI, though their offerings are limited.
Larger firms such as TwelveLabs and Google are also active in this space. However, the Memories.ai solution looks more promising.
Its system can support many types of AI models and serve multiple industries.
