Synthetaic Inc., a provider of advanced artificial intelligence solutions, today announced that it has raised $15 million in new funding co-led by Lupa Systems and TitletownTech to accelerate the development and commercialization of its platform for classification and detection of image data.

The company’s Series B funding follows the company’s $13 million Series A funding round in March 2022, also led by Lupa Systems, which brings the total raised by the company to $32.5 million, according to Crunchbase. Other investors joining the round included IBM Ventures and the military contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

Founded in 2019, the company develops solutions that allow for the quick classification of vast amounts of unstructured visual data in minutes that would otherwise take days or months. The company does this with a system called Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, or RAIC. It can automate the analysis of large unstructured datasets of raw images and video, allowing organizations to train and deploy AI models much faster than traditional approaches.

“Over the past year, we’ve proven that when it comes to your data, if you can see it, RAIC can search it,” said founder and Chief Executive Corey Jaskolski. “The next chapter is about bringing that technology to market so that companies across all industries can find the seemingly impossible answers locked inside their visual datasets.”

The company’s technology has already proven itself in real-world circumstances. Its technology assisted in the tracking the full path of a suspected Chinese spy balloon using geospatial satellite data and visual imagery. The balloon, widely reported in the media, was spotted floating above the United States in February 2023.

Using only a hand-drawn sketch, it took RAIC only two minutes to return a match for it after scanning more than 18 trillion pixels of satellite Earth observation imagery. That became the basis for a report from The New York Times to build a visual investigation of the path of the balloon.

The RAIC system has also been used by CNN to study geospatial images of active war zones to produce stories about ongoing strife and provide more accurate reporting with visuals.

Synthetaic has been used by other news agencies such as the BBC and federal agencies such as the U.S. Air Force to investigate and build insights from their visual data. In August, the company announced a multiyear partnership with Microsoft Corp. that will provide the company access to massive cloud graphical processing power needed to deliver geospatial insights. Combined with daily insights and data from a partnership with Planet Labs PBC, the company’s customers can quickly unveil insights from satellite data from all over the world.

Image: Synthetaic