Mindtech Global, the Sheffield-based company that is developing synthetic data to train AI vision systems, has secured £4.4 million in a funding round led by creative-tech venture capital investor 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 Sheffield 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 Global is a developer of DataOps platforms for intelligently engineered synthetic data, enabling better AI models through data analysis, visualisation and curation.
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.
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 CEO Steve Harris said: “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.”
Keira Shepperson, Director at the British Business Bank, said: “The first Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) was established to support northern businesses like Mindtech, enabling them to unlock potential and create jobs in the region – this is exactly what Steve and the team has done, now boasting a team of 25 employees. We are proud to support a business in the region who are succeeding in the data and AI sector and look forward to seeing how Mindtech continues to grow.”