Mindtech Global, the Sheffield-based company developing synthetic data to train AI vision systems, has secured £4.4m in a funding round led by Edge and including Mercia Ventures, which was investing from its own funds and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.
The latest funding round will enable the company to further develop its technology, accelerate its presence in key markets including Japan, the US and Europe and continue its partnerships with industry leaders.
Mindtech solves a key challenge for AI developers – how to source sufficient images and datasets to train computer vision systems to identify humans or objects in different settings and recognise small but significant differences.
Its Chameleon platform uses games technology to create a virtual world and generate a diverse range of realistic images – for example with different backgrounds and objects, people with different ethnicities and at varying times of day or night.
Chameleon reduces costs and development time, while ensuring companies have legal ownership of data and comply with privacy laws. The use of diverse images also avoids creating bias within AI systems. Mindtech’s latest platform, Dolphin, analyses a company’s current training database and identifies issues such as bias, lack of diversity and sparsity of training data.
Mindtech originated from an idea from a group of industry veterans including Sir Hossein Yassaie, former CEO of chip manufacturer Imagination Technologies. The company now has a team of around 25 people and its technology is used in sectors including retail, healthcare, transportation and robotics.
The latest investment comes at a pivotal time. Analyst Gartner forecasts that by 2025, synthetic data will account for the majority of data used in AI training due to growing concerns about data scarcity.
Steve Harris, CEO of Mindtech, added: “This investment marks a pivotal moment for our company. With this support, we’re able to advance our technology and meet the growing demand for robust AI vision solutions across sectors.”
Fiona Dent, General Partner at Edge, said: “We are delighted to back Mindtech’s vision. Their ethical, GDPR-compliant, synthetic data platform solves the global data scarcity issue highlighted by Gartner, enabling the promise of AI vision to be realised 10x faster than before.”
Ashwin Kumaraswamy of Mercia Ventures said: “The world is on the verge of a major shift in uptake of AI in computer vision. However, there is a lack of datasets for real-world scenarios and for all eventualities, as they are hard to come by and aren’t GDPR compliant.
“Mindtech is a leader in this emerging market and enables machines to be trained on synthetic datasets that are highly realistic, therefore it has the potential to be a key building block of vision AI infrastructure.”
