V-Nova, what does the company Intesa Sanpaolo focuses on
Neva Sgr, the venture capital of the Intesa Sanpaolo group dedicated to the hi-tech sector, has become an investor in the British V-Nova Ltd. All details
Neva Sgr, the venture capital of the Intesa Sanpaolo group dedicated to the hi-tech sector, focuses on the growth of V-Nova, a British company with Italian roots, which operates in the sector of compression of video and image data streams.
V-Nova has therefore completed a round of “Series C” investments for a total of 30 million euros. Specifically, Neva First, the alternative investment fund managed by the asset management company, invested 5 million.
"The strategic importance of images and videos, their growing use in many areas of the economy of the future (from social media to smart and hybrid working models, up to autonomous driving mobility) are the elements that pushed Neva First to believe in the V-Nova business ", reads the note widespread.
“We decided to invest in V-Nova because it has all the characteristics to become a billion company in the coming years”, explains Mario Costantini, CEO of Neva Sgr.
All the details about the company, a leading provider of video compression solutions.
THE NEVA SGR STRATEGY
The objective of Neva Sgr, 100% controlled by Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center, a company of the group dedicated to innovation, is to make available to its investor customers the opportunity to invest through their own funds in companies with very high growth potential that operate on the main global innovation challenges. Silverpeak, the bank specializing in technology investments, acted as financial advisor to V-Nova in the equity financing round.
WHAT V-NOVA DOES
Founded in 2011, V-Nova focuses on technologies that allow you to take advantage of a new and richer experience of interacting with images and videos.
The main areas of application are: video streaming & conferencing, virtual reality & 360 video, social media, broadcasting, artificial intelligence indexing.
It currently has around 70 employees between its main office in London and India.
THE BUSINESS MODEL
V-Nova's business model is to monetize its technologies through software licensing IP royalties. The company has already obtained over 300 international patents.
THE TOP
The directors team is 100% Italian. The company is in fact led by Guido Meardi, CEO & Co-Founder. Pierdavide Marcolongo is the other co-founder and holds the role of Coo. President of the company is David Benello.
THE SHAREHOLDERS
V-Nova's shareholders represent a diverse group of strategic partners operating in the fields of TV, media and telecommunications. Among these are: the satellite operator Eutelsat and the entertainment giant Sky. Financial investors include Whysol Investment and Limitless Earth, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange.
PERSEUS TECHNOLOGY
In 2017, Eutelsat and V-Nova presented a new solution for HD satellite distribution. The latter was based on V-Nova's Perseus Pro, a technology that allows you to optimize bandwidth consumption without compromising video quality. In this way, the satellite operator offered the broadcast industry players a cost-effective and easy-to-implement solution, without any step down on quality.
As Hdblog recalled, “Perseus is already used in various situations of more or less common use. Sky uses an AVC base layer and an additional Perseus layer to provide HD streaming to Telecom customers (via the IPTV decoder). Rai, in collaboration with Eutelsat, instead used it for the Ultra HD broadcasts of Euro 2016 on Rai 4K ”.
THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPED SO FAR
"The support received from Neva Sgr – says Guido Meardi, CEO & Co-Founder of V-Nova – allows us to continue in our mission, that is to create a video compression technology that allows the greatest number of users to access their favorite content anywhere. and on any device. Neva's commitment allows us to further strengthen our balance sheet and will give a strong boost to V-Nova's strategy by strengthening our position on the market ”.
The company has developed highly innovative software related to video & image compression technologies such as: MPEG5 part 2 LCEVC (Low-Complexity Enhancement Video Coding), the first and only MPEG standard that improves the performance of any existing codec by making the most of current hardware and a new VC-6 codec, usable for next-generation applications, which encodes the video stream data in a completely hierarchical format, particularly suitable to be read and easily processed by artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms.
ATTENTION TO ESG ISSUES
Finally, as the note underlines, "Fundamental, in the evaluation of the investment, was the attention to ESG issues, an element that is always important for Neva Sgr and in line with the commitment of the Intesa Sanpaolo Group on green investments".
The solutions proposed by V-Nova help, in fact, to reduce the environmental impact as they improve the performance of the videos using the current hardware present on the devices without having to replace it and, moreover, thanks to the decrease in the computational capacity required by the servers for the video encoding reduces energy consumption in data centers.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/v-nova-cosa-fa-la-societa-su-cui-punta-intesa-sanpaolo/ on Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:50:50 +0000.