Axwave, Inc.

Axwave, Inc. is an international software development company that has developed a proprietary fingerprinting-based Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) technology. Axwave was founded by Damián Scavo, former algorithmic trader, Loris D'Acunto, Nuclear Physicist, and Manuel Gilioli, M.S. in Bioengineering. Axwave is currently headquartered in Menlo Park CA, and has offices in New York, Italy and Poland.

Back in 2012, Loris D’Acunto and Manuel Gilioli were spending some time at the Hacker Dojo Tech Hub in Mountain View; after several successful ventures in their home country of Italy, they wanted to experience the Silicon Valley environment. During one of the sessions, they overheard someone speaking Italian, and introduced themselves. That person was Damián Scavo, a successful serial entrepreneur himself, and the introduction ended up becoming what today we know as Axwave.

The company was incorporated in the United states in April 2012, with the first headquarters located in Palo Alto, California. From the beginning, Axwave focused on developing a cutting edge fingerprinting-based ACR technology for mobile devices (later, this scope was expanded and PC and Linux versions have been created as well). In this solution, audio from any media source is captured by the device's microphone in a private and secure manner. Already in the first iterations, Axwave managed to improve the accuracy and speed of the main competitors in the ACR field, matching Music, Live and Time Shifted TV, Radio, TV Ads and OTT content, as well as custom content uploaded by customers.

Gsound, a consumer app, was made available to the public in the App Store and Google Play Store as a proof of concept to validate the technology, with superb results and positive feedback from key industry players. Gsound reached 1,000,000 downloads while available in the stores.

Axwave’s technology is currently used by some of the largest multi-billion dollar companies in the media research industry through paid panelists to track key behaviors and viewing habits. Axwave's panelist device technologies are about 100 times cheaper and more efficient than the technology previously used in households. Additionally, it allows for recognition of data that has not been watermarked. An important consideration is that Axwave's technology was born mobile, without any legacy platform/product to rely on, and that gave the company a significant competitive advantage.

Axwave also licenses its technology to mobile application developers by providing them an software development kit (SDK) to be integrated within the app. Axwave reached one million installations by January 2014 through this model. Axwave has always followed a customer centric approach that has allowed the company to keep improving the core technology and products by focusing on those key aspects highlighted by customers rather than adding unnecessary (and time consuming) features. The SDK encrypts, compresses and sends small bytes of data to servers, which then matches against a worldwide media catalogue. The algorithms used are unique in the field (they can measure OTT viewership), and are currently handling billions of queries per month. For example, data collected by Axwave shows that indeed OTT is the 29% of the current market share to date (2015).

A key aspect of the company's success is the content catalogue: it currently covers more than 75,000 TV ads, Live TV on the Top 140 US channels, up to 35 days of time shifted TV and the largest OTT content selection in the market (100,000 assets), including all Netflix and Hulu originals, making it the largest catalogue in the industry. Axwave also has TV channels available in 15+ countries and Radio stations worldwide.

Axwave has also developed a TV Ads occurrence monitoring solution that covers all the commercials broadcast in the US Top 100 TV channels.

The company currently has 6 patents pending, and several others will be submitted in the next few moths.