A Yorkshire start-up which has created a platform to train robots to recognise images has completed a £2.3m funding round.
Mindtech Global is based in Sheffield, and it using the cash to build its team in the city and expand sales of its product worldwide.
The fundraise was led by NPIF – Mercia Equity Finance, which is managed by Mercia and is part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF), with Deeptech Labs and In-Q-Tel participating.
“Data scientists and machine learning engineers can spend up to 80 per cent of their time sourcing, cleaning and organising training data. Our Chameleon platform solves this challenge,” explained Steve Harris, CEO of Mindtech.
“This round will enable us to open up our platform to even more customers in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, enabling them to build AI vision solutions that better understand the way humans interact with each other and the world around them.”
Its Chameleon platform has been designed to reduce the time and cost involved in bringing artificial intelligence (AI) systems to market by changing the way visual AI systems are trained.
Visual AI systems can have wide-ranging uses in areas such as retail, smart cities, homes and healthcare – for example, spotting if a child has slipped their parent’s hand in a busy supermarket, if someone is behaving unusually on a train platform or if a resident in a care home has fallen over and needs help.
At the moment, training these systems means processing thousands of real-life images.
The Mindtech platform means developers generate a sequence of synthetic images and create scenarios that show the algorithm what to look out for.
“Mindtech’s game-changing technology has the potential to transform the AI industry, which will underpin many areas of our day to day life. This investment round, led by NPIF and Mercia, will allow it to build its team and its client base to take the business to the next level,” added Will Clark of Mercia.
