What Waffle Video does

Waffle Video, Inc. is a two-sided marketplace platform that connects video creators (branded as 'WaffleMakers') with AI and technology companies seeking commercially safe, purpose-built video training data. The company was founded in 2023 by filmmakers Joey Newfield (CEO) and Joshua Mesnik (COO), alongside Founding CTO Mario Aburto, motivated by their experience during the Hollywood actors strike and a belief that creators should earn ongoing residuals when their content is licensed repeatedly — applying a film-industry revenue-share model to AI training data. The platform is built around three components: a patent-pending mobile application where creators onboard, film paid 'Missions,' tag clips, and upload footage; an enterprise portal at enterprise.wafflevideo.ai where AI companies place custom video data requests, view sample datasets, and access subscription information; and M.A.P.L.E. (Media Asset Processing & Labeling Engine), an internal quality-control and metadata-processing layer that structures ingested video for downstream AI training pipelines.

The business model combines three revenue streams: upfront mission payments to creators (transactional), passive royalty-style income to creators when footage is relicensed (licensing/royalties), and enterprise data services sold to AI and tech companies via quote-based subscription contracts. The creator side is freemium with no subscription fees; the enterprise side is direct sales with multi-year contract potential. Distribution is global via Apple App Store and Google Play on the creator side and a dedicated sales team on the enterprise side. The company is privately held, founder-owned, headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware (251 Little Falls Drive), operates globally, and has received earned-media coverage in Wired. No institutional funding rounds, customer logos, or revenue figures are disclosed in available sources.

Name

Waffle Video

Legal name

Waffle Video, Inc.

Website

https://wafflevideo.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2023

Operating status

Operating

Short description

Waffle Video operates a two-sided marketplace connecting video creators with AI companies needing custom training data. Creators film paid 'Missions' through a patent-pending mobile app and earn passive licensing income, while AI firms access M.A.P.L.E.-processed datasets via an enterprise portal.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

AI Training Data Platform

NAICS

Motion Picture and Video Production (51211), Motion Picture and Video Distribution (51212), Motion Picture and Video Industries (5121)

SIC

Services-Motion Picture & Video Tape Production (7812)

akta.pro primary industry

Short-Form Video Creation, Editing & Templates Apps (MPACAHAE)

Keywords

• Video training data
• AI data marketplace
• Creator monetization
• Computer vision data
• Video licensing platform

Headquarters

HQ city

Wilmington

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B and B2C

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Marketing or Sales, Operations, Others

Revenue model

1. Creator Video Licensing: AI companies license video content created by WaffleMakers. Creators earn passive income each time their footage is relicensed to AI companies, creating a recurring revenue share model similar to film industry residuals.
2. Mission-based Video Production: Creators earn upfront payments for completing paid video 'Missions' through the mobile app. Each approved upload earns the creator money.
3. Enterprise Data Services: AI companies pay for custom video datasets. The platform offers flexible pricing plans based on data needs and usage, including sample datasets, pricing, and subscription information for enterprise clients.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels4 records

Core offering

Waffle Video operates a two-sided marketplace platform that mobilizes a global network of video creators to film purpose-built video footage for AI training. Creators use a patent-pending mobile app to complete paid 'Missions' — specific video capture assignments — and earn upfront payments plus passive income when their footage is relicensed to AI companies. AI and tech companies access an enterprise portal to commission custom video datasets with metadata-rich, commercially safe content for training computer vision models.

Product overview

Waffle Video is a two-sided marketplace platform connecting video creators with AI companies needing training data. The platform consists of three main components: (1) the Waffle Video Mobile App - a patent-pending mobile application where creators film, tag, and upload paid video 'Missions'; (2) the Enterprise Portal - where AI companies place custom video data orders and access quality-controlled, metadata-rich datasets; and (3) M.A.P.L.E. (Media Asset Processing & Labeling Engine) - the internal quality control and metadata processing system. Creators earn upfront payment for approved uploads plus passive income when their footage is relicensed to multiple AI companies.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Waffle Video Mobile App A mobile application enabling video creators (WaffleMakers) to register, accept paid 'Missions', record short video clips, tag them, and securely upload for AI training data purposes. Creators earn upfront payment for approved uploads plus passive income when their footage is relicensed to AI companies. Available globally via app stores.
• Enterprise Portal A dedicated web portal at enterprise.wafflevideo.ai for AI and tech companies to commission custom video datasets, browse sample datasets, access enterprise-grade quality-controlled and metadata-rich video content, and license footage at scale for training visual AI models.
• M.A.P.L.E. (Media Asset Processing & Labeling Engine) An internal processing engine that handles quality control, validation, and metadata tagging for video content submitted by WaffleMakers, delivering ingestion-ready, purpose-built video training data to AI company clients.

Segments2 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

No

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability2 records

Feature3 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• Deep Music Alliance (DMA)minorOthersWaffle Video is listed as a member of the Deep Music Alliance (DMA), an organization focused on the intersection of technology and creative industries.

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Emerging players

• Encord: Encord builds annotation and dataset management software for multimodal AI, including video, to help teams prepare training data. It is an indirect competitor to Waffle Video's M.A.P.L.E. engine, sitting one layer upstream as the labeling-tooling alternative.
• SuperAnnotate: SuperAnnotate offers an end-to-end platform for video and image annotation used by AI teams to build training datasets. It competes with the M.A.P.L.E. engine portion of Waffle Video's stack, though Waffle's differentiator is its proprietary creator-capture supply rather than tooling alone.
• Roboflow: Roboflow provides tooling and a marketplace for computer vision dataset creation, labeling, and management used by AI engineers. It overlaps with Waffle Video on the supply side of computer-vision training data but is more platform/tooling-led than creator-network-led.

Direct peers

• Appen: Appen provides high-quality training data for AI and machine learning, leveraging a global crowd of annotators across text, image, audio, and video. Like Waffle Video it sells ethically-sourced datasets to enterprise AI labs, but operates at much greater scale via a longer-tenured platform.
• Clickworker: Clickworker operates a large crowdsourcing platform producing AI training data, microtasks, and content. It competes with Waffle Video's creator-network approach for AI data supply and serves similar enterprise model-building customers.
• Hive: Hive combines a human annotation workforce with proprietary models to deliver labeled image, video, and text training data to AI teams. It is directly comparable to Waffle Video on the video-AI training-data wedge and the enterprise sales motion.
• Toloka AI: Toloka crowdsources data labeling and dataset creation through a global contributor network for AI customers. Both firms compete to sell AI customers diverse, crowd-produced training data at scale, though Toloka is broader across modalities and Toloka's contributors are paid per task without a residuals layer.
• Defined.ai: Defined.ai runs an AI training-data marketplace connecting enterprises with vetted crowd contributors producing ethically-sourced datasets. It overlaps directly with Waffle Video on the two-sided data marketplace thesis and the same compliance-conscious AI customer segment.
• Scale AI: Scale AI is the largest AI training-data provider, offering labeled datasets across modalities including image and video via a contractor network and tooling. Waffle Video competes for the same enterprise AI customers and creator/crowd supply, but Waffle focuses exclusively on video through a mobile creator app with residuals.
• Sama: Sama supplies ethically-sourced, high-quality training data with a focus on computer vision, serving major AI customers via a global workforce. Its positioning on ethical sourcing and computer vision maps directly to Waffle Video's differentiator of commercially safe, metadata-rich video training data.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks7 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/waffle-video

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles3 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Waffle Video