Blackrock-backed Minute Media acquires Indian AI startup that extracts sports highlights

Summary

BlackRock and Goldman Sachs-backed media startup Minute Media, which owns properties like Sports Illustrated, The Players’ Tribune, and 90 Minutes, announced Monday that it is acquiring VideoVerse, an Indian AI startup that lets broadcasters extract highlights and create content from sports footage. VideoVerse’s clients include the Indian Premier League and Women’s Premier League Cricket tournaments, FIFA+, and broadcasters Nippon TV and Cubber TV. Mumbai-based VideoVerse was founded in 2016 by Vinayak Shrivastav. The company is backed by Bluestone Equity Partners, A91 Partners (a fund by former Sequioa India execs), and Moneta Ventures, and have raised $105 million in funding to date. While Minute Media or VideoVerse didn’t provide a valuation for the deal, sources told TechCrunch that VideoVerse was valued between $200 million $250 million during its last round in 2023, and Minute Media’s deal was in a similar range. Minute Media CEO Asaf Peled said that VideoVerse’s acquisition is the biggest for the company in terms of both value and company size. VIDEO Minute Media has largely grown through strategic mergers and acquisitions, including The Players’ Tribune, Fansided, Mental Floss, and STN Video. Shrivastav said that in its initial days, VideoVerse built multiple AI tools, including one to detect smoking and drinking, which was helpful for the Indian sensor board to flag certain scenes for movie certification. It also worked on object identification and deployed that tech for e-commerce sites for identifying items in a video. However, the startup transitioned to building video editing and detection tools for sports broadcasters. “In 2016, Hotstar (which is now owned by Jio) was growing, and they were looking for a solution that could identify certain action points in sports and primarily in cricket,” Shrivastav said about starting its sports journey. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025 A few years later, VideoVerse dropped its other products and...