Berlin-based AI startup Hasty raises $3.7 million to help label computer vision data

Hasty, a Berlin-based provider of next-gen annotation tools for vision AI practitioners, has raised $3.7 million in seed round led by Shasta Ventures, with support from coparion and iRobot Ventures. The company will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand its customer base across Europe and North America. 

Computer vision (CV), or vision AI, enables computers to gain a high-level understanding from digital images or videos, but that data is only useful if it’s properly labeled. The German startup claims about 80 percent of a data scientist’s time is spent cleaning up and organising such data, so that half of the vision-based AI projects never actually make it into production. “There are over 750,000 machine learning practitioners today who are working on vision AI topics and spending the majority of their time managing data rather than building and tuning neural networks,” said Tristan Rouillard, co-founder, and CEO of Hasty. “This represents a $30 billion dollar waste that we aim to tackle head-on.” Hasty’s tool speeds up annotation because it trains the AI model as you label. The more the tool is used, the faster the labeling becomes, and engineers don’t have to wait months for feedback about whether the model is working. Overall, the tool offers up to 70 percent time savings, says the startup.