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Today’s startup has been on my radar for a while, but now they’ve found a direction that seems to be working, and they have some interesting partnerships and plans ahead. Read on to find out all about Bridged Media.

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Bridged Media wants to help publishers gain an AI advantage in tough times

Times are tough for digital publishers, with ad revenue lower than it used to be, and shaky sentiment among industry professionals.

While the latest AI tech might provide opportunities for publishers to gain a commercial advantage, or at least keep up with the competition, the fact is that only a small number of these companies have the resources to develop their own AI tools.

Bridged Media is a startup that wants to help companies get the benefit of specialist AI tools without the hassle and expense of building them. 

The startup’s tech allows publishers to configure AI-based ‘agents’ for common tasks on both the editorial and business sides of their operations.

How it works

Bridged Media’s sales pitch promises “Tools that integrate seamlessly with your existing technology stack [requiring] no technical sprints. Just a line of code and you are ready to go.”

“Just a line of code” is a familiar startup pitch line, and in this case, the line of code can enable a range of different capabilities. These include an SEO assistant to help content perform better in search engines, content summary bots, and a sales module that prompts users with compelling subscription offers at suitable times.

It’s all managed through an online dashboard where the tools are configured and can be connected up to an existing CRM or content management system as required

“We’ve built all these pipes and made it self service, for publishers to deploy, test, and experiment with these agents in a matter of minutes,” says co-founder and CEO Maanas Mediratta.

The story so far

Bridged Media is Mediratta’s second startup. His first, CabAmigo, was in the shared mobility space, and he says he sold it to India’s Uber-like taxi app company Ola in 2016.

Following that experience, he spent time doing consultancy in the tech side of the media industry. He witnessed the imbalance of power between publishers and companies like Meta, who repeatedly moved the goalposts publishers had to target if they wanted to build and maintain large audiences.

Remember the disastrous ‘pivot to video’?

Spotting an opportunity to level the playing field when it comes to access to tech in media, Mediratta and his fellow co-founders first began working on a news app which got them into Techstars’ London programme in 2021. But they quickly realised a pivot was required.

“We were using AI to create better news experiences, and one of the things that we realised was that while this will help increase the user experience, it does not meet our mission, which is to create that level playing field,” Mediratta says.

And so they shifted to a B2B approach, targeting publishers. Initially they believed tools to boost audience engagement were the golden goose, but across what Mediratta describes as “400 experiments” they decided that an AI agent platform was the right approach.

After using 2023 as a development year, and launched their offering earlier this year. Mediratta says more than 30 publishers now regularly use the platform.

The startup’s sales funnel involves a no-commitment demo, followed by a three-month pilot phase that involves testing and fine-tuning agents for the specific customer’s needs to figure out which of them deliver the best return on investment for the customer.

From there, publishers can take up paid subscriptions to the agents that deliver them the most value. At the time of writing, subscription packages are priced from £749 per month and from £1,999 per month, depending on the offering.

Bridged Media also has a pair of distribution partnerships: one with the Financial Times’ media consulting arm FT Strategies, and another via a project with Quested Consulting.

The road ahead

Bridged Media is working on allowing its products to work with more languages (Mediratta says it currently supports 20), along with their own proprietary small language models to underpin each of the agents.

Mediratta says they already have inbound interest from Europe, Asia, and South America. But in terms of business development, he says they’re going to focus mostly on Europe, while exploring the US market.

And despite the startup’s name, they don’t want to stick to the media market. They’re already investigating opportunities in other industries.

“Other industries have the same problems. They have online inventory that needs to be optimised and distributed properly,” says Mediratta.

“We've had some very strong interest from retail and education that we will also look to experiment with. All of this will be strategised and brought into a prioritisation framework.” 

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