Mindtech Global, a pioneering AI company in Sheffield, secures substantial funding to enhance AI vision systems.
- A £4.4m investment led by Edge and participating investors aims to expand Mindtech’s technology and market reach.
- The Chameleon platform addresses the challenge of sourcing diverse, realistic images crucial in training AI systems.
- Mindtech’s latest Dolphin platform further refines training data by identifying biases and sparsity.
- Analysts predict synthetic data will dominate AI training by 2025, underscoring the significance of this funding.
Mindtech Global, based in Sheffield, has secured £4.4 million in a funding round led by Edge, along with contributions from Mercia Ventures and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund. This significant financial boost aims to further advance Mindtech’s development of synthetic data technology used in training artificial intelligence (AI) vision systems.
The company’s Chameleon platform utilises games technology to create virtual worlds, generating diverse and realistic images. These images vary in aspects such as background, objects, ethnicity, and time of day, helping AI systems accurately identify humans and objects while minimising bias and ensuring compliance with privacy regulations. This approach reduces the costs and time involved in AI development.
Furthermore, Mindtech has launched Dolphin, a new platform designed to analyse existing training databases to uncover biases, diversity issues, and data sparsity. By doing so, Dolphin enhances the quality and effectiveness of AI training datasets, ensuring they are robust and comprehensive.
The emergence of synthetic data as a primary source for AI training reflects a growing trend, highlighted by analysts like Gartner. They forecast that by 2025, synthetic data will be instrumental due to the ongoing challenges of data scarcity, making Mindtech’s innovations particularly timely and significant.
Steve Harris, CEO of Mindtech, emphasised the importance of this investment, noting that it represents a pivotal moment for the company to advance its technology and meet burgeoning demand. Fiona Dent of Edge and Ashwin Kumaraswamy of Mercia Ventures also expressed their support, citing Mindtech’s potential to be a key player in the AI vision infrastructure space.
Mindtech’s fundraising marks a crucial step in addressing data scarcity in AI, setting new benchmarks for AI vision technology.
