Hasty Raises $3.7 Million to Build Next-Gen Vision AI Annotation Tool

BERLIN, Nov. 24, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Hasty, the leading provider of next-gen annotation tools for vision AI practitioners, announced it has raised $3.7 million in seed funding led by Shasta Ventures alongside coparion and iRobot Ventures. The company will use the funds to continue to accelerate product development and expand its customer base across Europe and North America.

Training the Model While Labeling to Bring Agile Methodologies to Vision AI

Computer vision (CV), or vision AI, enables computers to gain a high-level understanding from digital images or videos and has the potential to change how we perform daily tasks – from diagnosing diseases to tracking packages through the supply chain to analyzing advanced materials worldwide.

Current approaches to data labeling are too slow. They don't train and update the model while labeling so 80% of a data scientist's time is spent finding, cleaning, and organizing the "ground truth" data they use to train their neural networks. It, therefore, comes as no surprise more than half of the vision-based AI projects never make it into production. Machine learning engineers often have to wait three to six months for first results to see if their annotation strategy and approach are working because of the delay between labeling and model training. Hasty's labeling tool makes projects, well, Hasty!

"Before discovering Hasty, labeling images was labor intensive, time-consuming, less accurate, and progression through the groundwork to build our AI detection model was much more frustrating," said Jenny Abrahamson, Software Engineer of Audere. "Hasty's approach of training the model while labeling with faster annotate-test cycles has saved us countless hours. The speed and ease of use have allowed us to accelerate our mission to improve global health in the world's most underserved communities."

Hasty's next-generation tool speeds up annotation because it trains the model as you label. The more the tool is used, the faster the labeling becomes. Hasty's agile AI delivers rapid feedback so engineers can adapt and validate their approach as they work. Hasty gets faster and smarter the more it is used -- delivering the increased speed and accuracy engineers require today. Highlighted features and capabilities include:

• Hasty AI Assistants predict labels just after a few annotated images; the more it's used, the faster it gets resulting in ever-increasing levels of automation. Hasty's neural networks learn while engineers build their datasets enabling engineers to go from ideal to first model results in a single day.
• Hasty Error Finder & Manual Review detects hidden annotation errors from misclassifications, artifacts, missed objects, and poor segmentation. AI-powered quality control and effectual manual review highlight errors. Instead of spending days looking for errors, users spend minutes fixing them.
• Hasty Rapid Feedback Loop gives short feedback cycles, enabling users to iterate quickly to validate and adapt their approach as they label. Now users can adapt their annotation strategy, test different approaches, and be confident they are creating the right data in weeks rather than months.

"There are over 750,000 machine learning practitioners today who are working on vision AI topics and spending the majority of their time managing data rather than building and tuning neural networks," said Tristan Rouillard, co-founder, and CEO of Hasty. "This represents a $30 billion dollar waste that we aim to tackle head-on. That is why we have created a next-generation annotation tool and community that reduces data prep and management time by 70%. We put our customers ahead of the game and significantly increase their ability to bring more successful vision AI projects to market, faster."

Issac Roth, Partner at Shasta Ventures said, "Vision AI has the power to unlock the future of automation and accelerate the creation of new products and services in a way not seen since the Web Revolution. Hasty's team of engineers understands this and has delivered a best-in-class solution that gets faster and smarter the more it is used – delivering the increased speed and accuracy engineers need to deliver on the promise of vision AI."

About Hasty:

Hasty is a Vision AI company helping humans teach machines to see the world. Based in Berlin and coming from wattx, Hasty supports Vision AI practitioners by developing best-in-class annotation tools that are supported by a community of machine learning engineers, data scientists and software developers. Hasty's next-generation annotation tool labels data in one-tenth the time through self-learning AI-assistants and agile machine learning that provides rapid feedback so engineers can validate and adapt models as they work. For more information, visit https://hasty.ai/ or follow us on Twitter @hasty_ai.

SOURCE Hasty