Data startup Instill AI has scooped $3.6m (£2.9m) in seed funding, counting a Google DeepMind director and ex-Microsoft M&A advisor among its angel investors.
London-based Instill AI has created tools to analyse images, videos, audio or text – unstructured data – and convert it into a uniform format to feed into AI applications.
Instill AI was founded by CEO Ping-Lin Chang and COO Xiaofei Du in 2020.
“We believe that machine learning and AI should be as easy to access as other off-the-shelf cloud services in the software industry today,” said Ping-Lin Chang, CEO and co-founder of Instill AI.
RTP Global led the seed round, with additional capital coming from Lunar Ventures and Hive Ventures.
Ex-Microsoft M&A advisor Charles Songhurst, and the director of product at Google-owned DeepMind Mehdi Ghissassi, were among the angel backers.
Instill AI’s technology is currently open-source, but it wants to launch a managed version of its product via the cloud before the end of the year.
The seed investment will also be spent by Instill AI on doubling its team before 2024.
Gareth Jefferies, partner, RTP Global, said: “Having first-hand experience of the pain that comes with deploying AI services, Ping-Lin and his co-founder Xiaofei found a way to help companies of all sizes overcome that pain and seamlessly bring AI into the modern data stack to unlock the value of unstructured data.”
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