Axwave
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Software development, Automatic content recognition |
| Founded | April 2012 |
| Founder | Damián Scavo, Loris D'Acunto |
| Defunct | August 2019 |
| Fate | Acquired by Samba TV |
| Headquarters | Menlo Park , United States |
Area served | Global |
| Products | Fingerprinting-driven automatic content recognition technology, Gsound app |
Axwave, Inc. (which was acquired by Samba TV in August 2019) operated as a global software development firm focused on proprietary fingerprinting-driven automatic content recognition (ACR) solutions. The company was established by Damián Scavo, formerly an algorithmic trader, alongside Loris D'Acunto, a nuclear physicist. Axwave maintained its main office in Menlo Park, California, with additional locations in New York, Italy, and Poland.
Corporate history
Founded in April 2012 and initially based in Palo Alto, Axwave engineered sophisticated fingerprinting ACR technology designed for panel-based research through mobile people meter devices. These meters interfaced with Axwave’s media monitoring servers deployed across North America and Europe. The company asserted that its technology delivered higher precision and faster performance than other ACR providers.
Axwave launched Gsound, a consumer-facing application available on both the App Store and Google Play, serving as a demonstration of their technology; it accumulated 1 million downloads. Their solutions were utilized by media research organizations via compensated panel participants to accurately monitor viewing behaviors. Axwave’s hardware offerings were reported to be approximately 100 times more economical than traditional household devices and enabled detection of content without watermarks.
The ACR system compresses and encrypts small packets of data sent to centralized servers, where they are matched against an extensive global media library. Proprietary algorithms analyze consumption across radio, podcasts, television programs, and OTT platforms, handling billions of queries each month. According to Axwave’s data, OTT represented 29% of the market share in 2015.
A significant edge for Axwave was its comprehensive content database: encompassing more than 75,000 TV advertisements, live broadcasts from the leading 140 US channels, up to 35 days of time-shifted TV content, and the industry's largest OTT collection with 100,000 assets—including all originals from Netflix and Hulu. The company also monitored TV channels in over 15 countries and worldwide radio stations.
Axwave created a solution for tracking TV ad occurrences across commercials aired on the top 100 US television channels. The company held three issued patents along with eight provisional patent applications.
In April 2018, Axwave collaborated with FanDuel and the NBA to create NBA InPlay, a real-time mobile fantasy game synchronized with live NBA broadcasts.
The acquisition of Axwave by Samba TV in August 2019 expanded Samba TV’s capabilities in connected TV data analytics and ACR technologies.
Awards
- Winner of San Francisco Music Tech, 2014
- Recipient of the Siemer Wavemaker Award, 2014
- Ranked among the Top 5 Most Innovative Companies at SXSW 2014