Qloo raises $25M to predict your favorite movies, TV shows and more
Summary
The buzziest AI today GenAI is an undoubted labor saver, generating images, emails, songs and more in record time. Founded in 2012 by Alex Elias and Jay Alger, Qloo seeks to uncover consumer behaviors and trends across entertainment, fashion, travel, sports, food and other segments.Elias, an NYU Law School graduate, says that he was inspired to found Qloo after noticing a gap in the market for what he calls taste knowledge.As a passionate advocate for culture I play the tenor saxophone and piano, and have a deep appreciation for midcentury cinema I saw the fragmented world of taste knowledge, he told TechCrunch in an interview. I noticed that while companies like Spotify, Expedia and Netflix dominated their respective sectors creating data silos, there was a lack of a unified system capable of understanding and predicting diverse personal tastes across different domains without relying on identity-based data.So Elias teamed up with Alger, who previously led the digital marketing agency Deepend, to launch Qloo.Today, Qloo offers companies AI-generated correlation data across many culture and entertainment domains, including film, travel, nightlife, literature and so on. In addition to building a self-service research tool aimed at marketers and medium- and small-business customers, the startup is introducing what it calls a multi-person recommendation AI, which can match the profiles of any two people in Qloos database based on their preferences. In 2019, Qloo acquired TasteDive, an entertainment recommendation engine, and Elias implied that future acquisitions would be along similar strategic lines.