Australian technology start-up, Sourse will escalate its enterprise customer acquisition strategy in Australasia and through South-East Asia in 2020 and expand into new industry sectors.
This follows the $15.8 million sale of OVO Mobile’s 77,000 customers to amaysim, which was announced this week.
OVO Mobile holding company, My Mobile Data established Sourse following its acquisition of Incoming Media Inc’s patented content engagement AI and machine learning technology in 2018.
Born in the CSIRO’s Data 61 labs, Incoming Media’s technology was acquired by My Mobile Data to build on its own mobile video content streaming platform, OVOPlay.
Since then, OVOPlay has been the testing ground to prove the ability of Sourse’s audience engagement machine learning AI to boost engagement, deliver superior content personalisation and drive customer yield.
Over this time, Sourse’s machine learning AI has evolved into a SAAS platform designed to be licensed to businesses looking to improve customer acquisition, retention and yield.
How does this sale help Sourse?
With the sale of OVO Mobile, Sourse is now able to step up plans to, for example:
- Hire additional engineers and data scientists to Sourse’s current team of three PhD data scientists, who created the company’s proprietary software.
- Allow this expanded team to escalate further development of Sourse’s proprietary software to apply to different sectors, with focus on commercial subscription businesses including energy, retail, insurance and financial institutions.
- Establish permanent business development resources in South-East Asia.
“When we acquired this technology in 2018, it was with the intention of commercialising the broadcast audience of OVOPlay and proving that the future of mobile and media was in the convergence of both sectors.
The Sourse AI platform has done this, and selling the OVO Mobile business means we now have more opportunity to focus on, and invest in, realising that potential across any business sector that relies on customer engagement,” said My Mobile Data and Sourse CEO, Matt Jones.
“The Sourse-powered OVOPlay was one of the key reasons why OVO Mobile grew to 77,000 subscribers. OVOPlay subscribers spent on average, 10 per cent more on their telco services compared to those who didn’t watch our content, and had a 15 per cent lower churn rate.
The lifetime value of these customers was 40 per cent higher than mobile-only customers.
These key metrics were directly driven by Sourse’s patented machine learning products including personalisation and recommendations algorithm, context aware engagement and churn management modules.
“This evidence is why Southern Cross Austereo and Pancast have been early adopters of the Sourse technology since we started licensing the SAAS platform in late 2019.
It is also why we have been able to reach advanced discussions with more than 20 utility and subscription businesses, retail brands, media and mobile telecom businesses across Australia and South-East Asia to adopt the platform in such a short space of time, despite COVID-19.
“The OVO Mobile sale means we can better take advantage of Sourse’s leadership position in the AI-driven personalisation and customer interaction management, as the licenser of our proprietary SaaS platform.
Everyone we’re speaking to has a common goal of improving customer engagement and increasing customer yield, and our learnings from OVO Mobile and OVOPlay in particular, are incredibly compelling to that end,” Matt said.
Matt Jones said amaysim’s purchase of the OVO Mobile business will allow the My Mobile Data team to pivot to focus solely on building the Sourse AI platform, which enabled such great outcomes for OVO Mobile.
“This is a unique moment in history where almost every industry is having to reconsider how they deploy human capital and where they can replace tasks better suited to AI with more high-value tasks for their human resources, delivering greater value to their customers, subscribers and audiences.
Sourse provides an opportunity to help these businesses and industries redefine what they mean to people at a consistent scale and accuracy that human resources simply cant.
“We want to be the go-to SaaS platform for enabling rapid enablement of machine learning by offering immediate integration to key industry systems of record, and providing automated engagement and transaction processes to brands’ customer facing services for any business looking to adapt to this new normal,” Matt said.
