Even though human beings are pretty much designed to be unrestrained, their living experience is largely based on a particular ability to find solutions. You see, these solutions are how we make our bid for that next step, and consequentially, become better over time. Now, if we are to assess all the solutions we have devised throughout the history, we’ll notice each one boasting a unique element, but in all honesty, we are not likely to come across anything as unique as technology. Technology’s emergence was such a game-changer mainly because of the way it impacted everything so quickly, and in case that itself wasn’t enough, the creation would then go on to build something special upon those foundations, therefore ushering us into a whole new era. With such a progressive dynamic running the show, we’ll see many ingenious by-products popping up on our way. In fact, a recent funding suggests that there might be a lot we still haven’t seen yet.
Synthesis AI, a startup developing a platform that generates synthetic data to train AI systems, has successfully secured over $17 million in Series A financing. Led by 468 Capital, the round saw further participation coming from the likes of Sorenson Ventures and Strawberry Creek Ventures, Bee Partners, PJC, iRobot Ventures, Boom Capital, and Kubera Venture Capital. According to certain reports, the company will use the newly-raised cash to solidify its research efforts in the area of mixed real and synthetic data. To support that upgrade, Synthesis AI is also planning to conduct an extensive recruitment drive.
With our data requirements growing at a breakneck pace, we are officially living a reality where we have to find an alternative to the organic version. Created artificially, synthetic data appears as a rather cheaper substitute here, but mind you, the lower cost doesn’t make it any less valuable, and Gartner’s prediction go the distance to validate the same. Talk about Gartner’s prediction, it expects 60% of AI development and analytics projects to have synthetically-produced data by 2024.
“As companies develop new hardware, new models or expand their geographic and customer base, new training data is required to ensure models perform adequately,” said Yashar Behzadi, CEO and Founder of Synthesis AI. “Companies are also struggling with ethical issues related to model bias and consumer privacy in human-centered products. It is clear that a new paradigm is required to build the next generation of computer vision.”
At present, Synthesis’ cloud-based platform allows companies to generate synthetic image data with labels using a combination of AI, procedural generation and VFX rendering technologies. The company’s scale is pretty evident in its 100,000-big “synthetic people” database, which helps in jobs like facial recognition and monitoring.