London-based Unitary has raised $8 million in new funds. Along the lines of what Checkstep and Bodyguard are doing, the startup uses contextual AI to automate content moderation and keeping the bad actors at bay.
Led by Ian Hogarth at Plural the round saw the participation of a number of angel investors including former VP, Global Business Group, Carolyn Everson. According to the startup, the capital will be used to further flesh out the team as it moves ever forward with partnership acquisitions, and continues development of its open-source online safety-for-all programme.
Unitary was founded in 2019 by Sasha Haco and James Thewlis. Haco, a mathematician who worked with Steven Hawking on the black hole information paradox during her Ph.D. at Cambridge, and Thewlis, a computer vision specialist who previously worked with Facebook AI Research, met at an Entrepreneur First’ accelerator programme.
Leveraging the ever-growing power of AI, according to Unitary, their offering can ‘read’ the context of user-generated videos. Meaning, the machine can tell the difference between footage of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and documentary footage used to illustrate the dangers of said actions. All sans human intervention.
“The scale and speed at which harmful content can spread across social networks and the internet is only growing. Online platforms can’t handle the complexity of moderating these billions of daily images, videos and other posts, whilst human moderation has proven to be ineffective at dealing with the volume of content as well as being largely harmful to those involved,” said Haco. “At Unitary, we’re committed to making the internet a safer place for everyone and with the support of investors like Plural, who understand the complexity of developing and scaling deep tech, we can see a clear route to making an impact on this snowballing problem that affects us all.”
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