Damon Neale, CEO and Founder
Damon founded Metadat-AI to give media teams the benefits of AI without handing their data to someone else.
Highlights
- Serial entrepreneur: co-founded and sold an AI start-up in 2020.
- More than 10 years' experience as CTO for multiple companies.
- Developed industry-leading courses in Cloud and AI.
- Active DPP member, contributing to white papers.
- Speaker at leading industry events, including IBC, BVE, SMPTE, HPA and NAB.
- Sits on the IAMT UK Council.
Why Damon built it
Working with media companies, Damon kept seeing the same problems with AI:
- Too expensive at large video scale.
- Token-based pricing too complex to calculate, and variable, so finance leaders could not sign it off.
- Too generic to solve specific media problems, or built by companies that do not understand media workflows.
- Tools trying to be full asset managers too, or expecting you to work in their tools instead of your existing workflow.
- Legal compliance, security and confidentiality treated as an afterthought.
Metadat-AI is the answer to each: simple pricing, built for media, and tools that fit your workflow and run where your data already lives.
Experience
- More than 15 years working with video and media technology, since 2009.
- More than 10 years as a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for multiple companies.
- More than 10 years leading professional services teams, delivering managed cloud solutions for over 85 media businesses with more than 10,000 users and petabytes of data.
- Adviser to start-ups, and interim CTO on major global technology change programmes for multi-billion-dollar companies.
- Enterprise and solution architect, evaluating and designing media workflows for broadcasters, studios and global media groups.
Qualifications
- Solicitor of England and Wales.
- BCS ISEB Enterprise and Solution Architect, APMG PRINCE2 Project Manager and AssistKd Requirements Engineer.
- First Class Honours, BA Media and Communications, University of London.
Why media technology and law
Most AI problems in media have an adjacent legal problem: data location, consent, biometrics and confidentiality. Media law has also become far more complex. A UK video publisher now works to around 17 Acts and regulations dating from 1959 to 2024, and several arrived in the last six years, including the Online Safety Act 2023, the DMCC Act 2024 and the HFSS advertising rules. Regulators now use AI themselves: the UK advertising regulator scanned nearly 60 million online ads in 2025.
AI is great at boring, complex and repetitive work, so media compliance is a strong use case that can protect brands and audiences. Damon designs Metadat-AI so the technology and the law work together from the start.