Adventr CEO and founder Devo Harris Adventr
Funding: A $5 million seed round in 2021 led by Paladin Capital, with participation from Reinventure Capital, In/Visible Ventures, and music artist John Legend.
What it does: New York-based Adventr is essentially like a Siri for video. Its "SmartListen" feature uses patented AI-powered voice control to allow users to interact with videos in real-time.
Adventr founder Devo Harris was previously a Grammy award-winning producer and music executive, who worked with artists like Kanye West and John Legend. Legend, who was also Harris's college roommate, is now an investor in Adventr.
In 2010 Harris put out a video from the band R!ot in Paris for its "Attack of the 5 ft. Hipster" track. It didn't get a good reception in the YouTube comments. The following week, Harris uploaded the same video but added interactive buttons so users could choose which scene to watch next. It was a hit.
"The next thing I know, all these media companies reached out to me and I then spent the last decade diving into video tech," Harris told Insider.
Adventr offers cloud-based software that lets anyone create what it calls "smart media," to let users interact with videos to ask questions, purchase products, or initiate text messages or phone calls. It also offers an enterprise product that's been used by clients including Chevy, Disney+, Shopify, AWS, and X — the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — who integrate their databases or apps so that their videos can provide real-time responses to queries.