content-discovery
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The Remote That Came With the Phone - and Stayed Too Long
Peel escaped a $100 piece of hardware by putting a universal remote inside the phone. The distribution trick worked spectacularly - until software people had not chosen began asking for more attention than they wanted to give.
Abe Dane Put Down the Magazine and Built a Better Way to Read
Before Abe Dane helped publishers turn dense libraries into searchable products, he reported from fighter jets, Arctic ice and the early internet. His career is a study in making complicated things useful.
Redbrick Quit Selling Clicks and Built a $100 Million Software Portfolio
The Victoria company escaped a volatile performance-marketing model by turning its operating playbook into a portfolio. Now the interesting product is not any single app - it is the machinery Redbrick uses to make mature software grow again.
Decide
Decide is a St. Louis-based advertising technology company - the rebrand of LockerDome, founded in 2008 - that runs a machine-learning platform called the Decision Marketplace. Rather than relying on third-party cookies or intrusive identity data, Decide lets multiple ML models compete in real time to select and price ad impressions, powering a two-sided marketplace that connects publishers and brands across the open web. Its widgets and content-recommendation units have reached over 100 million monthly users, positioning the company as a cookieless, performance-focused alternative to legacy programmatic ad stacks.
Shaped
Shaped is a New York-based AI company that builds a real-time relevance engine for recommendations, search, and agent retrieval. Its managed platform, Shaped Cloud, combines embeddings, machine-learning models, and fresh behavioral data to return personalized results in under 50 milliseconds, letting product and engineering teams add for-you feeds, hybrid search, and personalized discovery without building ranking infrastructure from scratch. Founded in 2021 by Tullie Murrell, Daniel Camilleri, and Shai Bruhis, the company raised an $8M Series A led by Madrona in 2024 and was acquired by live-commerce marketplace Whatnot in July 2026.
Pinterest is a visual discovery and inspiration platform where people find and save ideas for projects and interests, from recipes and home decor to fashion and travel. Founded in 2010 and headquartered in San Francisco, it lets users organize images called Pins into themed collections called boards, and increasingly acts as a shopping-and-discovery engine powered by visual search and AI. Publicly traded on the NYSE, Pinterest reached roughly 631 million monthly active users and $4.2 billion in 2025 revenue, earning nearly all of that from advertising.
Minerva Networks
Minerva Networks is a San Jose-based software company that builds carrier-grade service management and video delivery platforms for pay-TV and broadband operators. Founded in 1992, its platform lets telcos, cable and satellite providers offer IPTV, OTT and hybrid television - with live TV, VOD, network DVR, catch-up and FAST channels - across set-top boxes, smart TVs, mobile and web. More than 300 operators worldwide run Minerva, and the company now layers AI-driven content discovery through its Minnie AI Companion and its FAST+ streaming service.
Trell
Trell was an India-founded lifestyle social commerce platform where users shared roughly three-minute vertical videos about their interests - travel, beauty, food, fashion and wellness - across eight regional languages. Started in 2016 by four IIT-Bombay friends, it grew a large community skewed toward Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, then pivoted in 2020 into in-app shopping through 'Trell Shop.' It raised about $66 million from investors including Sequoia/Peak XV, KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, Mirae Asset and H&M, before a 2022 governance probe and cash crunch triggered mass layoffs and a steep revenue collapse.
Xperi Inc.
Xperi Inc. (NYSE: XPER) is a San Jose-based entertainment technology company whose work hides in plain sight inside the devices people already own. Through its DTS, HD Radio, TiVo and IMAX Enhanced brands, Xperi puts immersive sound in living rooms, smart software on televisions, broadcast and streaming radio in cars, and personalized discovery across pay-TV and IPTV platforms. Spun out of Xperi Holding Corp in 2022 as the product-focused half of the business, the company now reaches hundreds of millions of devices worldwide while pivoting its growth toward a media platform built around TiVo OS and the connected car.