Based in Cork, Giyst is a spin-out of University College Dublin that was launched earlier this year with the help of NovaUCD and CeADAR.
Video is arguably the most potent form of content creation on the web, accounting for more than 80pc of all consumer internet traffic last year, according to one Cisco report.
But while the number of videos posted online increases exponentially as social media apps and websites continue to add more users, it is no secret that average attention spans have seen a simultaneous nosedive. This means there is a need for shorter, more compact videos.
And what better tool to deploy in this endeavour than artificial intelligence, the talk of the town in the world of tech. Start-ups around the world, Ireland no exception, have been popping up to use the latest in AI technologies to help content creators cut a long story short with AI-powered video editing and give their audiences the ‘TL;DR’ version of any spectacle.
Our latest Start-up of the Week, Giyst, has built one such video summarisation platform that uses AI to discover and enable efficient consumption of the “essence” of content.
“The idea behind Giyst is to remove the challenges involved in repurposing video content, be it keynote speeches, Ted Talks, webinars, interviews, lectures, learning and development content, HR videos, tutorials, or Zoom meetings,” co-founder Colm Murphy tells me.
“We do this by utilising the power of AI to transform what is typically a time consuming process of manual video editing into a matter of minutes.”
Based in Cork, Giyst is a spin-out of University College Dublin that was launched earlier this year with the help of NovaUCD and CeADAR, Ireland’s national research centre for applied AI.
Even though 80pc of all consumer internet traffic is video, Murphy argues users can’t keep up due to information overload and shortening attention spans.
“Discovering the right content is also a real challenge, particularly for Enterprise Video Platforms,” explains Murphy, who has spent large portions of his career in North America and the UK across various international sales roles in start-ups and multinationals.
“Our patent-pending technology helps drive four times more content discovery, increasing audience retention by 40pc and conversion by 140pc. Our AI summarisation technology allows users to repurpose large volumes of long form video at speed and scale in a fraction of the time.”
According to Murphy, there is a need for on-demand videos across marketing, events, communications and educational training, and Giyst has seen “very strong early traction” with SMEs across industries such as education, healthcare, media, entertainment and finance.
His own background is in marketing. A postgraduate of marketing from the University of Galway, Murphy has more than two decades’ experience in sales roles for global multinationals such as Oracle and Adobe, as well as start-ups such as Poppulo and Candidate Manager.
Now, he wants to improve the way content is repurposed globally with Giyst and become a market leader in the space.
“We believe there is enormous untapped knowledge and value waiting to be shared with customers, employees and partners but the time, skills and budget required to do this is prohibitive for companies,” Murphy says.
To meet growing demand for its platform across Europe and the US, the team recently hired a new business development representative, bringing the fledgling start-up’s headcount to five.
Giyst has also managed to fundraise €250,000 from a combination of angel investors and Enterprise Ireland. Its seed round is expected to close in the first quarter of next year.
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