WASHINGTON — Synthetaic, a startup that uses artificial intelligence to analyze data from space and air sensors, announced Feb. 6 it raised $15 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by Lupa Systems and TitletownTech, with participation from IBM Ventures and Booz Allen Hamilton.
Wisconsin-based Synthetaic made headlines a year ago when it used artificial intelligence and Planet Labs’ satellite imagery archive to independently track the Chinese spy balloon’s path across the United States before it was shot down.
“Over the past year, we’ve proven that when it comes to your data, if you can see it, RAIC can search it,” said Corey Jaskolski, Synthetaic CEO and founder.
RAIC, short for Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, is the company’s analytics tool. It can rapidly identify images or items in images that would otherwise require a significant amount of human hours, and is especially effective for images with insufficient image data to train AI models, said Jaskolski.
The company uses RAIC to analyze satellite imagery, full-motion video, drone photography and infrared data.
RAIC was built on the Microsoft Azure cloud. Under a recent agreement Microsoft will provide Synthetaic access to nearly 1 million hours of cloud compute resources over five years.
Synthetaic has also inked a partnership with Planet Labs.
‘Bring technology to market’
“The next chapter is about bringing this technology to market so that companies across all industries can find the seemingly impossible answers locked inside their visual datasets,” said Jaskolski.
“With the volume of image and video data that companies have previously been unable to take advantage of, Synthetaic now provides a new capability to make that data useful and valuable, said TitletownTech managing director and Synthetaic board member Jill Enos.
“This is a very compelling investment in support of our AI strategy,” said Thomas Whiteaker, IBM Ventures partner.
