How 6000TB of Global Footage Trains AI and Pays Creators

Who Is Troveo? Troveo is a video licensing platform helping creators monetize unused footage through AI licensing: Content owners such as creators, filmmakers, or anyone with a trove of old video can sign up to license their content libraries for AI training. The company ensures ethical sourcing of footage and provides a new revenue stream for creators, filmmakers, and other content owners, while enabling AI companies to develop high-quality, legally compliant content models.

Head of Growth Sarah Barrick was employee No. 4 Before Troveo was called Troveo, she says with a laugh. She says the company was started by a group of like-minded individuals with a common mission.

We're founded by a team of people who have been in the creator economy for a very long time, helping creators of all kinds monetize, she explains. That's what we've based our entire careers on how to get creators paid for their work. We entered the market with the goal of making sure that creators don't get left out in the age of AI.

Troveo Highlights:

Works with an army of 2,400-plus content licensors (including creators and filmmakers) who upload an average of 6,000 TBs of video every month.

Content owners in its network have uploaded more than 350M video clips and received more than $5M in payouts.

Founded in 2023 by former Vouch founder Marty Pesis; emerged from stealth in late 2024 and already has more than 20 employees.

Raised $4.5M in seed funding in late 2024 from Seven Seven Six and angel investors.

AI workflows

The Challenge: Ingesting Thousands of TBs Per Month for AI Processing Troveo works with content licensors (such as creators and filmmakers) to acquire unused footage from B-roll to home movies to sell to technology companies to train AI models. It ingests a menagerie of content types, from 4K clips to celluloid reels from the late 1800s that need to be video upscaled into high-resolution footage.

Fittingly, Troveo is now the world's largest video network for AI training. We ingest the data and do processing on it to prepare it for AI training pipelines, explains Head of Growth Sarah Barrick. And then we deliver that to technology and AI companies.

But as a technology startup, time is of the essence. And getting all that video from multiple content owners around the world, each with varying degrees of technical ability, into cloud storage in time to meet deal deadlines was a major challenge.

Challenge #1: Easy-to-use, global large file transfer Working with content owners from around the world, in different languages, with varying degrees of technical expertise, meant Troveo's video upload solution had to be easy and intuitive to use for anyone even accounting for potential language barriers.

The steps to upload content into the bucket had to be extremely minimal particularly the steps for the end user, our licensors, Barrick explains. Trying to use a command line interface or something like that to transfer content was out of the question.

The Troveo team didn't have time to field hundreds of support questions from content owners having trouble navigating the upload. We were a small team. We could not be going back and forth on email in various languages with people about content ingestion.

Challenge #2: Fast, scalable file ingest and organization The breakneck pace of Troveo's scale-up with both licensors and AI partners meant it needed a lot of content uploaded to the cloud fast to meet deal deadlines.

The number of TBs in our cloud bucket needed to go up as fast as possible, she explains. Our major challenge was getting it into the cloud as fast as possible.

Troveo also needed transparency along the data upload pipeline for its users, and for all uploaded content to be organized by type once uploaded.

Challenge #3: Reliable file transfers Troveo risks alienating licensors if they have a bad file upload experience by having to babysit transfers, retry failed transfers, or sit through poor customer service. The company needed a solution it could depend on to deliver a frictionless experience for end users.

Many of these people had never had to do anything like this before in their life, says Barrick. It was asking them to do something completely new.

Challenge #4: Simple integrations and onboarding

Finally, Troveo also needed a file transfer solution that could easily integrate with its Amazon S3 cloud storage bucket without requiring a heavy IT lift, so uploaded files would land in the right spot with minimal manual intervention.

It also needed to be a fast, simple experience for internal staff to get onboarded.

The Solution: A Flexible, Powerful, Easy-to-Use Transfer Solution With Global Reach After testing several file transfer solutions, Barrick says it soon became obvious that MASV was the missing piece. When we found MASV, we knew it was something creators could use, she says, adding that she and Troveo adviser and creator Peter Hollens initially helped research various file transfer tools. It was a no-brainer.

But ease of use wasn't everything: Troveo ingests an average of 6,000 TB of footage each month. Content licensors typically upload file packages in the 300 to 500 gigabyte range, but sometimes more than a terabyte in one shot.

All this content needed to be ingested quickly, reliably, and securely, so the company could meet its deal deadlines with AI firms.

Easy-to-use file transfer that moves mountains from anywhere

Troveo now generates a private, secure MASV Portal for each content owner following contract signing; uploaders simply drag-and-drop their files into the Portal.

The ultimate factor was the usability, says Barrick. It was just so easy for users they didn't even have to download a desktop client. They didn't need any technical expertise, and could use

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