Computer vision startup Matrice.ai Inc. said today it has closed on a strategic expansion of its seed funding round, adding to the original investment it first disclosed in May.

It didn’t disclose the size of the round, but the cloud infrastructure provider Voltage Park Inc. was named as the lead investor, with Ax3.ai, Plug and Play Ventures and a number of angel investors participating.

The company is the developer of a popular and fast-growing no-code platform for creating artificial intelligence models that can see the environment they operate in. It’s designed to simplify the development of computer vision models, with its no-code approach enabling them to be built and deployed up to 40% faster compared to traditional methods. The startup also says it can reduce development costs by up to 80%, as it eliminates the coding grunt work.

One of the major advantages of Matrice.ai’s no-code approach is that its platform can be used by anyone, regardless of their coding background. It provides a user interface that allows users to outline their idea for a computer vision model, then automatically create the relevant code and start training it.

The startup also emphasizes its data-centric approach to computer vision model design, and provides tools to automate the process of labeling datasets, so they can be used to train vision models for specific applications. This is important, because the more data it’s provided with, the better the quality of the models it creates. Once the model is trained to the user’s satisfaction, Matrice.ai will deploy it in the cloud, on-premises or edge environment of their choice.

Computer vision is a powerful tool for automation, giving machines the ability to interpret and understand visual data. By processing vast amounts of visual information quickly and in real time, it can improve the accuracy and efficiency of everything from factory machines to sensors and drones.

For instance, in manufacturing, computer vision makes it possible to inspect finished products or components at high speeds, automatically identifying any defects that may be difficult to see, or invisible to the human eye. It’s also extremely useful in areas such as healthcare, where it can analyze medical scans much faster than doctors can do and assist in diagnoses

. In the retail sector, it can enable shoppers virtually to try on a new pair of jeans or a dress inside the store. In cars, it can help self-driving vehicles to avoid obstacles by quickly scanning their surroundings.

Matrice.ai says its Vision Factory platform has already gotten itself a large fanbase, and claims to be powering “hundreds of live cameras” for enterprises as far as the Philippines and the Middle East. Many of those customers are in the energy and retail industries, while some are in the public sector, the company said. It added that its models support applications in oil fields, retail floors, smart cities, stadiums and more.

Matrice.ai co-founder and Chief Executive Amar Krishna said the backing of Voltage Park provides it with not only capital but also key infrastructure for deploying powerful computer vision models in industrial and commercial environments.

Voltage Park is not your usual investor. Its primary business is the AI industry, where it has developed a cloud infrastructure platform that encompasses more than 24,000 graphics processing units spanning six data centers. It provides lower-cost, on-demand and bare-metal access to GPUs, without virtualization layers, enabling it to increase performance and predictability.

Besides its cloud business, it’s also backing a select number of AI startups, providing them with access to its cloud resources at what it says are the most competitive rates.

“It’s more than a financial backer – it’s our partner for jointly developing and deploying vision AI factories,” Krishna said, citing its enterprise-grade infrastructure for AI training and inference. “[Now], we can build and deploy highly accurate, custom vision models at a speed and cost that was previously unimaginable.”

Voltage Park Chief Product and Technology Officer Saurabh Giri said his company’s nascent investment arm looks for startups that are moving from the theoretical to the transformational stage, and believes Matrice.ai is a great example of such a company.

“Its domain expertise in vision models enables our customers to convert pixels into intelligence with vertical-specific solutions across multiple industries,” he said.

Krishna added that he’s keen to expand beyond the Asian and Middle Eastern markets where the company is currently entrenched, and build up a presence in the U.S. and in Europe. At the same time, the company is also targeting new applications for computer vision models, such as flare detection, crowd analytics and queue monitoring systems.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Dreamina AI