Ryan Steelberg
Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chairman of the Board, Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ: VERI) at veritone
Ryan Steelberg is the co-founder, CEO, president, and chairman of Veritone, Inc. (NASDAQ: VERI), the enterprise AI company built around the aiWare cognitive-engine platform. A serial entrepreneur whose prior companies include AdForce, 2CAN Media, and dMarc Broadcasting (acquired by Google in 2006), he is a recurring named voice on AI-IP economics — most pointedly his framing of studio-AI licensing deals as a 'shift from behind the model to in front of the model.'
Ryan Steelberg is the named voice for the AI-IP-licensing-economics conversation that the trade press has been narrating without a consistent operator-side anchor. As co-founder, CEO, president, and chairman of publicly traded Veritone (NASDAQ: VERI), he sits at the intersection of three things the industry is converging on: enterprise AI infrastructure (the aiWare cognitive-engine platform), licensed voice synthesis (with built-in consent frameworks), and content-analytics tooling for media and entertainment customers.
The framing worth citing is his read on the new wave of studio-AI deals — including Disney’s three-year licensing agreement with OpenAI bringing more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars characters into Sora — as a ‘shift, or IP expansion, from behind the model to in front of the model.’ The phrase compresses a structural argument: rights holders that were previously training-data inputs (or training-data plaintiffs) are now negotiating consumer-facing surface placement instead, with compensation tied to model performance rather than upfront licensing fees. It is a sentence we did not read in the trade-pub coverage, and it is the sort of operator framing we attribute to him on first reference.
The career arc is consistent: AdForce (1990s, acquired by CMGi), 2CAN Media (acquired by CMGi), dMarc Broadcasting (acquired by Google in 2006), then co-founding Veritone with his brother Chad in 2014. The pattern is digital-advertising and audio-data infrastructure across three decades — exactly the substrate the current AI-IP wave is built on.