Why Veritone Stock Was on Fire in 2025

Veritone (NASDAQ: VERI) had a 2025 that might be hard to top in the coming years. Fueled by the hunger many investors have for artificial intelligence (AI) stocks, and quite a few positive developments in its business, the company's shares rocketed almost 42% higher over the year. Here's more about Veritone's 2025 to remember.

AI aggregator

Veritone has found a potentially very lucrative niche in the AI space; through its technology, anchored by the aiWARE operating system, users can organize even the largest heaps of data, including text, audio, video, and many other types of digital assets.

Image source: Getty Images.

That's an appealing prospect to many types of enterprise clients, and although Veritone is habitually unprofitable, many investors see great potential in its business.

That's one reason why they didn't massively sell out of the stock at the end of June, when management announced a registered direct share offering of $10 million. Typically, such a raise for a Veritone-sized company would instantly raise fears of stockholder dilution, however CEO Ryan Steelberg cleverly mitigated this by personally snapping up $1 million worth of that equity in a concurrent offering.

This clearly had a lasting effect, since neither of the two larger subsequent stock issues ($25 and $75 million, announced in September and October, respectively) involved a Steelberg buy-in and didn't affect the share price much.

In mid-July, Veritone announced that several of its products had been granted "Awardable" status by Platform One, a unit of the federal government's Department of Defense (DoD). This is more than just a vague, somewhat impressive-sounding title. It's a fast-track designation that indicates the DoD has vetted a potential supplier's products, security, and pricing and is ready to do business with it.

Almost needless to say, federal agencies can make for excellent clients. After all, they have huge budgets and tend to pay for what they contract.

Sure enough, mere days later, Veritone announced (in its second-quarter earnings release) that it had secured a sole-source contract with the Air Force to supply aiWARE and its iDEMS platform (a system designed for use by public agencies such as police and the judiciary) across a series of deployments. It didn't specify the value of the contract.

Success in the private sector

In the latter months of the year, Veritone's final earnings release of 2025 -- of its third-quarter figures -- revealed much to like about its performance. Chief among these was a monster 200%-plus year-over-year surge in non-legacy software revenue, which helped boost overall revenue by 32% to more than $29 million.

Finally, in mid-December, Veritone showed that it's competitive in the private sector too. It announced the deployment of aiWARE on certain self-hosted private tenants of Amazon's powerful Amazon Web Services. That's impressive not only because Amazon is a high-profile customer, but also because it shows Veritone can deliver the goods to even the most discerning and mission-critical enterprise.

I think investors were right to buy into the stock through all these positive developments. I do have to inject a slightly negative note here, though, and point out that Veritone remains habitually unprofitable. Still, its products are clearly compelling and they're selling, and the company obviously has momentum. Its stock looks like a buy at this point in 2026 too.

Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Amazon. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.