Cord raises $4.5M to automate computer vision annotation processes
Cord, a startup automating annotation processes for computer vision, today announced that it raised $4.5 million in a seed round led by CRV. CEO Eric Landau says that the capital will be put toward expanding Cord’s customer base and platform as the company looks to hire additional employees.
Training AI and machine learning algorithms requires plenty of annotated data. But data rarely comes with annotations. The bulk of the work often falls to human labelers, whose efforts tend to be expensive, imperfect, and slow. It’s estimated most enterprises that adopt machine learning spend over 80% of their time on data labeling and management. In fact, in a recent survey conducted by startup CloudFlower, data scientists said that they spend 60% of the time just organizing and cleaning data compared with 4% on refining algorithms.
“The company started when my cofounder, Ulrik Stig Hansen, left his job at JP Morgan to go do a degree program in computer science at Imperial College London,” Landau told VentureBeat via email. “My background was in physics as a Ph.D. dropout from Harvard, but I’d been working in quantitative trading where I was putting thousands of models into production. I met Hansen at an entrepreneurship network in London, and over a few pints at the pub, we realized that our perspective from finance could be applied to the process of labeling data.”
