SuperAnnotate Raises $3M In Seed Funding To Streamline Computer Vision Workflows
SuperAnnotate, an AI-powered annotation platform for machine learning engineers and annotation teams, raised $3M in a seed funding round led by Point Nine Capital with participation from Runa Capital and Fathom Capital. Previous investors Berkeley SkyDeck Fund and Plug and Play Ventures also participated. SuperAnnotate is an end-to-end platform for image annotation streamlining workflows between ML engineers and annotation teams. With SuperAnnotate, annotation tasks can be completed up to 10x faster while still maintaining industry leading levels of accuracy. Only launched this February, the company has already attracted more than 3,000 users from over 100 computer vision based companies and annotation service providers.
SuperAnnotate’s platform provides comprehensive systems for user, data, and quality management combined with advanced machine learning tools such as iterative model training, object predictions, and the company’s patented segmentation technology for rapidly accelerating semantic annotation tasks. Additionally, the platform allows companies to share small pilot projects with SuperAnnotate’s partner annotation teams in just one click. Based on the pilot results, companies can choose the right partner for their project based on requirements for price/quality/timing in just a few days. Prior to SuperAnnotate’s platform this process would take several months of testing and negotiations.
Annotated data is paramount for advances in self-driving cars, retail, healthcare and other industries; the market for data annotation tools is expected to reach $2.57 billion by 2027. Data preparation and engineering tasks represent over 80% of the time consumed in most AI and Machine Learning projects. Pieter Abbeel, one of the company’s advisors and a leading researcher and professor in machine learning at University of California, Berkeley stated, “SuperAnnotate’s ability to raise such a robust seed investment in this difficult time is a testament to the value of the technologies that they are providing around semantic segmentation and their ability to significantly increase the efficiency of annotation.”
In addition, Sharek Roomy, the CEO of Acme AI, a data labeling service provider at scale said, “SuperAnnotate’s algorithm allows annotators to work at a much faster rate without making errors
compared to the rest of the platforms out there. Their patented smart segmentation technology makes it possible for some tasks that previously required a lot of time and precision to be completed in a single click, which is phenomenal.”
“Having launched publicly only three months ago, we were very overwhelmed by such a high level of organic adoption of our platform from thousands of ML engineers and large annotation teams,” said SuperAnnotate’s CEO Tigran Petrosyan. “This shows that we are building something unique that customers value. That makes us very proud and humbled and motivates us to work even harder to satisfy our community.”
“At Point Nine, we’ve been investing in the picks and shovels of software for 10 years now, backing companies such as Contentful in the CMS space or Algolia in the search space. We believe that starting with annotation, SuperAnnotate has the potential to become a critical part of the next generation of software thanks to its built-in perception capabilities. We’re proud to be a small part of that journey.”
SuperAnnotate was founded in 2018 by two brothers who dropped out of their machine learning PhDs from top European Universities to build the fastest and smartest annotation tools. SuperAnnotate’s smart segmentation technology, developed by CTO Vahan Petrosyan while doing his PhD at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, became the first feature in the company’s platform. Today, SuperAnnotate has become the industry’s most powerful annotation platform bridging together best-in-class workflow automation with lightning-fast and highly accurate machine learning tools. For more information please visit https://www.superannotate.ai.
Point Nine Capital is a Berlin-based venture capital firm focused on seed-stage software investments. Since its founding in 2011, Point Nine has invested in over 100 companies, including SaaS startups such as Zendesk, Algolia, Automile, Contentful, and Typeform, as well as online marketplaces like Delivery Hero, Brainly, DocPlanner, and StarOfService. In June 2017, Point Nine
announced the closing of a new €75M million fund, Point Nine Capital Fund IV.
Founded in 2010, Runa Capital is an international venture capital firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California that invests in early-stage deep tech (i.e., AI, machine learning, middleware, open source), B2B SaaS, fintech, edutech and digital health start-ups. From 2010 to 2019, Runa Capital launched three funds totaling $427 million and invested in more than 70 companies in Europe and North America, including Nginx (acquired by F5 Networks for $670 million), MariaDB, Zopa, Brainly, drchrono, Smava, and Mambu. The firm’s founding partners have built several global software companies, including Acronis (raised a $147M round by Goldman Sachs in 2019), Parallels (acquired by Corel), Odin (acquired by Ingram Micro) and Acumatica (acquired by private equity fund EQT Partners).
Fathom is an early-stage venture firm based between San Francisco, CA and Austin, TX founded in 2017. Fathom invests primarily in enterprise applications, developer tools, intelligent hardware, cybersecurity and IT/ML infrastructure, and is currently investing out of its second fund. Fathom invests globally in seedand Series A-stage founders spanning geographies like the UK, Australia, France, Sweden, Bulgaria, India, Israel, Canada, Norway, Germany, Armenia, Mexico and Japan, as well as all across the United States.