Welcome to our Ecosystem Highlight series, where you’ll meet the innovators in our vast ecosystem of startup builders from across Florida, who are actively solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Majiye Uchibeke, Founder of Ingenee, which super-automates the repetitive, time-consuming work behind media and streaming operations.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to join, launch, or help grow your company?

Before co-founding Ingenee.ai, I founded eel streaming service. I did my master degree at University of Southern California in Los Angeles and interned at Netflix when I was there.

My content programming at Pluto TV (Paramount+) reached 7.1 million viewers, generating $7.05M in monthly ad revenue. I led the creation of Black Movies+ streaming platform, available on Roku (90M users) and Vizio (19M users), at OTT Studio.

As a film director, my 20+ films have won 12+ awards (including the Directors Guild of America award), in 6 countries and screened at 35+ film festivals across 16 countries and 5 continents.

I have collaborated with Pulitzer Prize, Emmy Award, Nobel Peace Prize, and Academy Award-winning leaders and organizations. I was named FilmmakerLife Magazine’s “Top Independent Creators of 2024;” and won the Entrepreneurial Excellence Award at Founders 2.0 Conference.

In 2015, I left Nigeria to pursue my education in the United States with very limited resources and no established network. Just two weeks after I arrived, my mother passed away unexpectedly. Overnight, I had to balance grief, supporting my family back home, and building a life in a new country while continuing my education.

Instead of giving up, I threw myself into my work. I earned my degrees, built a career in streaming media, and later pursued my masters degree at USC. Those experiences taught me resilience, discipline, and how to solve difficult problems with limited resources, qualities that now shape how I build Ingenee. When challenges arise, I focus on learning quickly, adapting, and continuing to move forward.

Our team combines deep expertise across streaming content operations, enterprise software, AI, and go-to-market execution. Co-Founder & CEO Majiye Uchibeke brings over a decade of experience programming and operating streaming platforms, including Netflix, Pluto TV (Paramount Skydance), and OTT Studio, alongside an award-winning filmmaking background as a Directors Guild of America Award winner, BAFTA finalist, and USC School of Cinematic Arts alumnus. Co-Founder Naresh Uppada contributes more than 18 years of enterprise software engineering experience from Yahoo, American Express, Sabre, Juniper Networks, and Revidd, leading the technical architecture behind Ingenee. Co-Founder Sampath Mallidi adds 18+ years of enterprise SaaS sales, partnerships, and scaling experience from Oracle NetSuite, Xebia, Aramark, and multiple startup ventures, driving commercialization and strategic growth. Supporting the team is Joseph Naylor, a veteran media executive with over 20 years of leadership across The E.W. Scripps Company, Cox Media Group, Gamut, Smart Media, Raymond James, Techstars, and Embarc Collective, providing strategic guidance, industry relationships, and enterprise market expertise.

Together, we’ve experienced firsthand the operational challenges Ingenee solves and have the technical, commercial, and industry expertise to build and scale the platform, thats why we built our company.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

People and businesses accumulate enormous amounts of photos, videos and other digital media, but computers don’t automatically them. We are building Ingenee.ai to do that.

A normal person might have 15,000 photos on their phone. A streaming service might have 100,000 movies. A content creator might have 50,000 video files. A retailer might have 500,000 product images. To organize it, they have to figure out what everything is, name it, add what’s missing and manually decide where it belongs.

We are starting with video streaming services because modern video streaming operations are fragmented, time consuming and expensive. They still rely heavily on disconnected software and large teams. Ingenee turns those fragmented workflows into an intelligent AI operations layer.

What gets me excited is we have a large market. Our tech goes into any industry with content, which is virtually all industries in this day and age. We are building Ingenee.ai, which super-automates all aspects of media operations. The rapid growth of streaming has made media operations increasingly complex, yet most companies still rely on outdated, labor-intensive workflows that don’t scale.

Modern Video Streaming Operations are fragmented, time-consuming and expensive. Metadata is incomplete and expensive. Thousands of titles. Complex rights. Expensive labor. Multiple platforms, channels and publishing endpoints. Inefficient, time-consuming processes on CMS and Spreadsheets.

Ingenee is AI-powered media operation layer for streaming services, cable networks, broadcasters, Radio & Audio Networks, sports networks, Studios & movie distributors, MVPDs & vMVPDs, News & Digital Publishers, Public Media, etc that super-automates media operations, metadata enrichment, Video-On-Demand programming, and Free Ad Supported TV scheduling, powered by AI, enterprise metadata sources, audience analytics, rights and content programming intelligence, with 90% Increase in efficiency, millions saved on labor and a 3-5x increase in watch hours.

The streaming industry is growing rapidly, with global streaming revenues exceeding $200 billion. The number of Live TV channel operators increased by more than 75% in just the past 4 years. As platforms expand their content libraries, channels, and video on demand storefronts, content operations have become increasingly manual, costly, and difficult to scale. Recent advances in AI make it possible to super-automate content programming, metadata enrichment, scheduling, and merchandising that previously required hours of manual work, enabling streaming companies to launch faster, increase revenue by lowering costs, operate more efficiently and maximize viewer engagement and profitability.

We’re starting with media because the economics and technology have converged. Global streaming revenue now exceeds $200B, and the number of live TV channel operators has grown more than 75% in four years. More channels and exponentially larger content libraries are creating a massive operational bottleneck: programming, metadata, scheduling and merchandising still require teams to do work largely by hand. AI now makes it possible to automate that work — creating an opportunity to change how a $200B+ industry operates fundamentally.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in helping build or scale the company? How did you overcome it?

Trust in AI products to take over human work. Fear that people will lose their jobs, as our product can do what humans spend hours doing in seconds. We positioned the product to work alongside humans in the loop.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We are raising our pre-seed to super charge our GTM. We have over 2,172 active FAST channels, up 17.5% over the past year and representing a catalog of over 220,000 titles

We estimate a $1.5 billion TAM, based on a bottoms-up analysis of more than 31,000 potential customers across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, including broadcasters, streaming platforms, FAST operators, live TV channels, cable/pay-TV and vMVPD operators, sports organizations, studios, content owners/distributors, and telcos with video services.

Our calculation is based on the annual software spend required to automate content operations, programming, scheduling, metadata, rights-aware workflows, and editorial merchandising.

Our current pricing ranges from approximately $30,000 per year for smaller operators to $225,000+ for enterprise operators, with substantially larger $500,000–$1.5 million OEM/white-label contracts.

A conservative blended annual contract value across the 31,000-company universe produces approximately:
31,000 potential customers × ~$48,400 average annual software spend = ~$1.5 billion TAM
This estimate is intentionally based on software revenue rather than the much larger economic value of the underlying media market.

The existing market demonstrates that media companies already spend significant amounts on individual pieces of the content operations stack. Our competitive research also shows annual pricing in the market around:

$144K — FAST scheduling
$91.7K — VOD programming/scheduling
$116.7K — strategic planning
$120K — title management / metadata / rights
$120K–$450K — personalization
$250K — metadata AI
$500K — recommendation/discovery

These figures demonstrate that content operations software is already a six-figure enterprise software category, rather than a small niche software market.

SAM
We estimate an initial $500 million SAM by focusing on the portion of the 31,000-company universe that has the strongest immediate need for automated programming and content operations.

This includes:
Streaming/OTT platforms
FAST operators
Broadcasters
VOD/AVOD/SVOD operators
Pay-TV/MVPD/vMVPD businesses
Telcos with video services
Sports leagues and teams operating video services
Large content owners and distributors

The underlying market is already substantial. There are more than 2,000 FAST channels, with FAST channel and content volumes continuing to expand, while the broader streaming ecosystem encompasses thousands of operators and an enormous catalog of programming. Current industry research also shows that FAST is becoming increasingly mainstream rather than a niche experiment.

SOM
Our initial $37.5 million SOM represents a deliberately conservative penetration target rather than an assumption that Ingenee will capture a large percentage of the market.

For example:
250 customers × $150,000 average ARR = $37.5 million ARR

That represents only approximately 0.8% of the 31,000-company customer universe and roughly 2.5% of our estimated $1.5 billion TAM.
We believe this is achievable without requiring Ingenee to become a dominant player in the entire media software market.

Additionally, OEM and white-label partnerships create an upside layer that is not fully reflected in the customer-count calculation. At $500K–$1.5M per OEM partnership, a relatively small number of OEM relationships can represent several million dollars of ARR-equivalent contract value.

We are excited for these opportunities.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with a founder just starting out.

Do not get lost; family, friends, and loved ones are more important, no matter how much you love your company. What will be the point of becoming a unicorn without loved ones there to celebrate with you?

Why Florida?

I love Florida. Reminds me of my country. It’s my home away from home. The opportunity here is massive. It’s still growing.

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