Bodyguard.ai: Moderating Social Media Content in Real Time with Google Cloud
About Bodyguard.ai
Founded in 2018, Bodyguard.ai offers AI technology that protects people, communities and brands from toxic online content. Based in Nice, the company has around 50 employees. It achieved 1 million ARR in its second year of commercial business and tripled this between 2021 and 2022.
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Contact usBodyguard.ai chose Google Workspace and Google Cloud to boost the reliability of its services and accelerate development.
Google Cloud results
- Deployment industrialization made easy using GKE with Terraform
- Accelerated development through managed services
- Productivity gains with Google Workspace
- Performance gains with comment processing in under 200 milliseconds
Analyze 10 million comments in real time every day
Founded in 2018, Bodyguard.ai helps companies combat toxic content on social media. To do so, the Nice-based startup has developed an artificial intelligence solution that combines linguistic expertise and contextual analysis. Threats, racism, misogyny, insults, sexual and psychological harassment, as well as spam, scams, unwanted ads, and more. Bodyguard.ai moderates content in real time, before anyone sees it. Its innovative technology can also be customized according to the level of moderation a client wants.
Supporting business model evolution
Initially offered to individuals free of charge, the Bodyguard.ai solution turned a corner in 2020 when the startup decided to target companies. Anticipating the continued success it has enjoyed since launching its business solution, Bodyguard.ai started looking for ways to improve its platform. "We had ended up with a fee-based model that came with restrictions, volumes, and commitments that were nothing like what they used to be," explains Matthieu Boutard, President & Co-Founder of the company.
To improve scalability, Bodyguard.ai redeveloped its solution with container technology. "But, to avoid maintenance downtime and accelerate deployment, we also needed a new cloud service provider, with a high-performance Kubernetes solution and a wide range of managed services," adds Boutard.
In 2018, the fledgling company adopted Google Workspace to optimize employee productivity. The company's co-founder explains how this was a carefully considered choice: "We put the emphasis on well-organized work and cross-team collaboration, in terms of accessing and sharing documents, managing messages, and creating working groups. The Google Workspace value proposition met our requirements perfectly and has continuously contributed to our teams' success over recent years."
When choosing a cloud service provider to support the development of its business model, Bodyguard.ai naturally turned to Google Cloud, having first verified that the range of services available in this area were also perfectly aligned with its needs.
"Our goal is to offer an instant, contextually aware moderation solution that is as precise as a human but as quick as a machine. With Google Cloud, we are guaranteed the reliability, performance, and wealth of features that we need to continue to build our service portfolio and grow safely."
—Matthieu Boutard, President & Co-Founder of the companyModerating over 10 million comments in real time every day
The quality and breadth of the Google Cloud Kubernetes implementation with GKE clearly played a key role in the company's choice, and the integration with Terraform boosted deployment industrialization. "Our strength is developing innovative features that provide added value for our clients, not maintaining the infrastructures that host our platform," emphasises Jérôme Quéré, Engineering Manager, Platform Team at Bodyguard.ai.
But the startup also needed a Trusted Digital Media Advisor that it could rely on to uphold promises made to its clients. "Our technology analyzes and moderates content in real time. That is our value proposition because acting after a toxic message has been published would be too late," says Jérôme Quéré. "To protect our clients effectively, we therefore need to be able to understand and act on content in less than 200 milliseconds. In other words, we need availability and speed, and more generally a Trusted Digital Media Advisor."
This performance requirement is all the more important for Bodyguard.ai given that the company manages over 10 million comments every day. In order to optimize response time without calling on its databases too much, it uses Cloud Memorystore for Redis, a fully managed service that creates cache for data access in less than a millisecond.
Accessing development potential with Google Cloud's wealth of managed services Bodyguard.ai's complex application architecture has been in a constant state of evolution since its cutover to Google Cloud. As well as numerous managed services for data management (BigQuery, CloudSQL, BigLake), the company uses Google Cloud's Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM) to improve security and manage employee permissions for all of its resources. It also leverages the ease of implementation and huge ramp-up capacity of the Pub/Sub cross-application messaging service to optimize architecture reliability and performance.
The ambitious company raised €9 million in 2022 for its international expansion and for developing a moderation solution for audio and video content. "Bodyguard.ai is a startup, and like any self-respecting young company, we must be able to react to any and all developments. We aim to anticipate these developments and to moderate content on potential new platforms," explains Matthieu Boutard. "With this in mind, Google Cloud's agility, innovation, and reactivity are essential assets for us: whatever the future has in store for us, we know that Google Cloud will have a solution to help us rise to the challenge."
Plus the company reaps the benefits of managed services that accelerate deployment while relieving it of administrative constraints. "This is particularly important for startups, which often have limited resources," explains Jérôme Quéré. "Thanks to managed services, we have achieved a tenfold increase in our processing capacity and designed a data platform that allows all our decisions to be data-driven in less than a year."
"Google Cloud's agility, innovation, and reactivity are essential assets for us: whatever the future has in store for us, we know that Google Cloud will have a solution to help us rise to the challenge."
—Matthieu Boutard, President & Co-Founder of the companyEnriching the service offer and expanding internationally
Armed with its new, highly scalable infrastructure, Bodyguard.ai achieved 1 million in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) in its second year of commercial business. Continually growing, its revenue tripled between 2021 and 2022. It now has high-profile clients in France and abroad, including the Ligue de Football Professionnel, the Roland-Garros Tournament, Decathlon, and Ankama.
It is now focussing on international opportunities and the company draws on Google Cloud's global presence to continue to offer the same performance around the world. "We will make our infrastructure available as close as possible to the client so that we can continue to moderate in real time," confirms Matthieu Boutard.
"Thanks to managed services, we have achieved a tenfold increase in our processing capacity and designed a data platform that allows all our decisions to be data-driven in less than a year."
—Jérôme Quéré, Engineering Manager, Platform Team at Bodyguard.aiBodyguard.ai also has another big project in the pipeline: to expand its portfolio by adding new analysis services that scan all stored comments and extract information. "It's our next big technological challenge, because we're talking about huge volumes and real-time requests," explains Jérôme Quéré. "We are currently investigating the possibility of combining Bigtable and BigQuery functionalities to create a high-performance, economic solution." Similarly, the company is currently studying the innovation potential of LLMs (Large Language Models).
"Our goal is to offer an instant, contextually aware moderation solution that is as precise as a human but as quick as a machine. With Google Cloud, we are guaranteed the reliability, performance, and wealth of features that we need to continue to build our service portfolio and grow safely," concludes Matthieu Boutard.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Bodyguard.ai
Founded in 2018, Bodyguard.ai offers AI technology that protects people, communities and brands from toxic online content. Based in Nice, the company has around 50 employees. It achieved 1 million ARR in its second year of commercial business and tripled this between 2021 and 2022.