JWX, the video technology company previously known as JWPlayer, has acquired the AI video startup Aug X Labs, best known for its Augie video studio. JWX now plans to incorporate Aug X’s video generation and editing tech into its own JWX Studio product. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but the Augie team will join JWX, where the startup’s co-founder and CEO Jeremy Toeman will now serve as the SVP of AI Innovation.
I”ve followed Augie for a while, and decided to catch up with Toeman this week to get his perspective on the evolution of the AI video startup space. Augie has seen great demand for content transformation among publishers, according to Toeman. “You've got hours and hours of video footage, but you now need 45 seconds here or two minutes [there].”
While publishers have been warming up to the use of AI for this, they’re also increasingly wary of creating content that misses the mark. “Nobody wants to be making slop,” Toeman says. “Even if they're going to use AI for everything or nothing, they don't want it to be perceived as slop.”
Augie is just one of a number of tools aiming to help publishers use AI, and Toeman tells me that he’s already seen signs of consolidation. “Oodles of the companies we used to call our competition have just disappeared,” he says. Trying to avoid that fate was one reason for the deal with JWX. “I recognized last summer that we were going to [have to] find ourselves in a bigger position very quickly if we wanted to keep playing the game.”
“2026 might be a tough year for sort of single function startups,” Toeman predicts.
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