Mindtech Global, based in Sheffield, has secured a significant funding of £4.4m to advance its AI vision technology.
- The funding round was led by Edge and included investment from Mercia Ventures and Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund.
- Mindtech’s Chameleon platform utilises game technology to create realistic synthetic images for AI training, addressing privacy and ownership issues.
- The innovative Dolphin platform identifies and resolves biases and data deficiencies in training datasets.
- This investment aligns with predictions that synthetic data will soon dominate AI training datasets.
Mindtech Global, a prominent company in the development of synthetic data for AI vision systems, has successfully raised £4.4m in a recent funding round spearheaded by Edge, with additional contributions from Mercia Ventures and the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund. This boost in funding is set to enhance Mindtech’s technological capabilities and expand its market presence across key global regions, including Japan, the United States, and Europe.
The funding is particularly crucial as Mindtech tackles a significant challenge faced by AI developers: sourcing sufficient and diverse images and datasets necessary for training AI systems to accurately identify humans and objects. Mindtech’s Chameleon platform innovatively employs gaming technology to simulate a virtual environment, thereby generating a wide variety of realistic images. This advancement not only helps reduce costs and speeds up development time but also ensures compliance with legal data ownership rights and privacy laws. The company’s approach effectively prevents bias from infiltrating AI systems by employing a broad spectrum of diverse images.
In addition to Chameleon, Mindtech’s Dolphin platform plays a pivotal role by critically analysing existing training databases. It identifies and addresses problems such as bias, lack of diversity, and insufficient data within these datasets. This dual-platform strategy places Mindtech at the forefront of solving data scarcity issues often highlighted by analysts, such as those from Gartner, who predict that synthetic data will soon represent the majority of data utilised in AI training due to ongoing concerns about data availability.
Mindtech’s origins can be traced back to a group of seasoned industry veterans, including Sir Hossein Yassaie, the former CEO of Imagination Technologies. With a dedicated team of approximately 25 professionals, Mindtech’s technologies find applications across a range of sectors, including retail, healthcare, transportation, and robotics. The recent investment arrives at a strategic moment, enabling Mindtech to capitalise on the growing demand for sophisticated AI vision solutions.
Steve Harris, CEO of Mindtech, articulates the importance of this investment, describing it as a pivotal moment that will allow the company to advance its technological offerings and meet the escalating demand from various sectors. Fiona Dent, General Partner at Edge, lauded Mindtech’s vision and emphasised the ethical, GDPR-compliant nature of its synthetic data platform, which promises to significantly accelerate the realisation of AI vision potential. Ashwin Kumaraswamy of Mercia Ventures underlined the critical role Mindtech is poised to play in the burgeoning market for AI in computer vision, noting the scarcity of GDPR-compliant datasets suited for real-world scenarios.
The £4.4m funding is set to propel Mindtech’s AI vision technology to new heights, addressing key challenges in data availability and diversity.
