Annotell, a Swedish startup that builds software to determine the perception levels of autonomous systems, has raised $24 million in a Series A funding round.
Working with many large OEMs, sensor manufacturers, and autonomous companies, including Mercedes and Volvo, Annotell’s software can perform large scale calculations with big data sets collected from LiDAR, cameras, and other sensors.
The funding round was led by Metaplanet, one of the first investors in DeepMind, and NordicNinja, the largest Japanese deep tech fund in Europe.
Added to previous funding rounds, Annotell has now raised more than $31 million.
“We intend to use the money to do more of what we’ve been doing, but better,” said CEO and co-founder Daniel Langkilde in a blog post. “Our focus continues to be on providing AD and ADAS developers with the category-leading software platform for training, testing, measuring, and arguing the safety of their perception systems.”
Moreover, the company is looking to expand its workforce and expects to have 100 people on the books by the end of this year.
While Annotell’s work might seem pretty esoteric, its software is critically important for improving the performance of autonomous vehicles and, by extension, their safety.
“It is, by now, a well-known fact that machine learning systems are never better than the data they are trained on, but very few people actually bother to quantify how good their data is,” continued Langkilde.
“It is tempting to treat your datasets as ‘the truth.’ While we strive to produce data that is as consistent, accurate and detailed as possible, we acknowledge that all data comes with a probability of being incorrect.”
The company is also looking to expand its product offering to cover a wider range of perception data quality, including products that help companies ensure their datasets contain the right things, and that they are calculating the right perception performance KPIs.
Annotell hopes that these new datastreams will increase its customers’ engineering velocity and lower the cost of their global data coverage whilst also improving safety.
Keyword: Annotell Raises $24m to Improve Autonomous Car Safety