Sydney-based Access Innovation Holdings Limited (ASX: AIM), popularly known as Ai-Media will now be listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) with a $177.4 million market capitalization. The Australian media company with international operations will list on the exchange from 15th September with a $1.23 issue price per share.
Established with the initial goal of creating captions for the hard-of-hearing and Deaf community, Ai-Media’s product portfolio offers captioning, translation, transcription, speech analytics and audio description.
About Ai-Media
Founded in 2003 by Alex Jones, who was born deaf, and Tony Abrahams in Sydney. The duo recognized a gap in the accessibility technology market and decided to establish Ai-Media. The company mainly deals in cloud-based solutions that merge the powers of AI, machine learning and human intervention to produce transcription, translation and captioning. Human curation and machine together offer high levels of accuracy that is surely more than what can be achieved solely from machines, reads the company’s prospectus.
Since 2009, more than 50 million has been invested in Ai-media’s tech platform. CEO Abrahams already owned almost one-fourth of Ai-Media but now will invest over $340,000 from seling down to 19.2 per cent.
Ai-Media has offices in Australia, UK, USA, Singapore, Norway and Canada. The company has a staff of about 160 full-time employees and a pool of 2000 freelancers, casuals and contractors.
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The role of Foxtel in Ai-Media’s success
on-demand/subscription TV provider Foxtel was AIi-Media’s one of first clients. Captioning costs were too high for the Pay TV industry. Consequently, Pay TV providers faced many challenges with more channels and smaller audience shares. At the same time, they were confronted with the same costs to produce 1 hour of captioning. Abrahams and Jones understood the gap and proposed cutting captioning costs by editing the existing international transcripts. This solution allowed a big name like Foxtel to offer more captions across several channels.
The founder duo also presented their technology to an ABC TV show New Investors in 2010 and won an episode. In May 2020, Ai-Media acquired United States-based Alternative Communications Services (ACS), a captioning and interpretation firm. The purchase price was not made public. However, after the transaction Ai-media’s FY 2020 review soared by a whopping 59%. The company reports a pro-forma revenue forecast of $37.9 million for FY 2020 and preducts $43.8 million in revenue for 2021.
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Image Taken and Modified: AI Media
