Unitary, a London-based startup working in the field of visual content moderation, has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. The company uses contextual AI to automate content moderation and keep the bad actors, e.g. NSFW or otherwise, at bay.
The investment arrives in conjunction with Unitary launching across multiple languages, has upped the team size to 41, and has tripled the number of daily videos it classifies to 6 million a day.
The startup’s Series A round was led by Stockholm’s Creandum with Paladin Group Capital and Plural participating.
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.
Unitary co-founder and CEO Sasha Haco shared:
"Our vision is for ethical, empathetic AI to enhance how visual content is experienced online. We’ve always focused on how we might be able to use AI to ensure a safer online experience, and keep up with the pace of internet content. This funding enables us to stay at the forefront of video understanding research and fulfil our mission of making the internet better."
Lead image: Sasha Haco and James Thewlis. Photo: Uncredited.
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