Landing AI Secures Funding to Unlock Power of Small Datasets, Unleashing Next Era of AI

Landing AI, which provides tools that make building and deploying AI systems in manufacturing faster and easier than ever, announced Series A funding of $57 million led by McRock Capital, the first investment firm focused exclusively on the Industrial IoT.

In addition, New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, Taiwania Capital, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Intel Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Far Eastern Group’s DRIVE Catalyst, Walsin Lihwa, and AI Fund all participated in the round.

Landing AI, led by artificial intelligence visionary, Andrew Ng, developed LandingLens™, a fast, easy to use enterprise MLOps platform. It applies AI and deep learning to help manufacturers solve visual inspection problems, find product defects more reliably, and generate business value.

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Landing AI sees the next era of AI as one in which all companies access the benefits of AI—not just consumer internet companies like Google and Facebook—but legacy industries such as manufacturing, healthcare, and agriculture. To do that, Landing AI says industries should adopt a new, data-centric approach to building AI that ensures that the data conveys what they need the AI to learn. Using data-centric AI technology, the application of AI will no longer depend on big data but on the data the entities actually have, which is often limited.

“You don’t always need big data to win with AI. You need good data that teaches the AI what you want it to learn,” said Ng, Founder & CEO of Landing AI. “AI built for 50 million data points doesn’t work when you only have 50 data points. By bringing machine learning to everyone regardless of the size of their data set, the next era of AI will have a real-world impact on all industries.”

The data-centric approach of Landing AI is also key to making LandingLens fast and easy-to-use. The process of engineering the data, instead of the AI software, gives an efficient way for manufacturers to teach an AI model what to do. Domain experts, not just AI experts, can now build an AI system, and take it to production. For example, rather than needing to write pages of code to train a neural network, a domain expert can do it with a few mouse clicks. This no code/low code data-centric platform enables new users to build advanced AI models in less than a day. Vision inspection projects that used to take over a year can be executed in just weeks using LandingLens.

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“Landing AI will unleash the power of the Industrial IoT one company, one factory, and one manufacturing line at a time,” said Scott MacDonald, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of McRock Capital. “We partner with relentless entrepreneurs, like Andrew, who bring transformative digital technologies to large industrial markets.” As part of the financing, MacDonald has joined the Landing AI Board of Directors.

“Digital modernization of manufacturing is rapidly growing and is expected to reach $300 billion by 2023,” said George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “The opportunity and need for Landing AI is only exploding. It will unlock the untapped segment of targeted machine vision projects addressing quality, efficiency and output. We’re looking forward to playing a role in the next phase of Landing AI’s exciting journey.”

Landing AI is on a strong growth trajectory and customers are reaping the benefits. “Partnering with Landing AI can improve the reliability and efficiency of our quality inspection process, which is important to our company’s growth. Using cutting-edge deep learning tools like LandingLens enables our team to move faster and focus on developing and commercializing our next-generation batteries,” said Tim Holme, Co-founder & CTO, QuantumScape.

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