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Raising a US$3.6 Million seed round, Instill AI ready to turn unstructured data into gold
The company's solution recently received a significant boost with a US$3.6 million seed round investment led by venture capital firm RTP Global.
Instill AI provides an open-source solution for handling unstructured data, which is data generated from audio, chats, images, and video files. As audio and image continue to complicate the data collection process, organizations face challenges in extracting valuable insights and making informed decisions. A three-step data management process called ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) usually is time-consuming and costly. Instill AI addresses these challenges with its cutting-edge unstructured data ETL tool. The tool simplifies the process of handling unstructured data by automating the manual steps of extraction and transformation, freeing up valuable time and resources.
Solving pain points for AI business, experienced engineers build the tools for Unfathomable unstructured data
The idea of Instill AI comes from two veteran AI scientists. Graduated from Imperial College London’s Ph.D. program, Ping-Lin Chang is a serial entrepreneur in AI areas. He was the co-founder and CTO of Umbo Computer Vision, an AI startup providing autonomous video security systems. After Umbo pivoted its service, Chang resigned from the team. In 2020, Ping-Lin co-founded Instill AI with Xiaofei Du to build the infrastructure for unstructured data ETL to make AI more accessible to all industry sectors.
Xiaofei Du worked at Umbo Computer Vision for more than 2 years as an AI researcher. Also experienced in the AI field, she holds a Ph.D. in Medical Physics from University College London with a research focus on Surgical Vision and Medical Image Analysis with Machine Learning.
Both familiar with AI, Chang and Du think alike. They have learned by experience that having big data ready for AI models to update and train is time-consuming and expensive. Moreover, the pain points of harnessing unstructured visual data lead to disconnected workflow. In other words, there are huge gaps between databases and AI. The complexity of unstructured data costs data scientists a ton of time to process, while AI scientists’ demand for new datasets is soaring. The disconnected workflow makes AI’s iteration and ideation too much to afford.
Both data scientists and AI scientists have marvelous professions, but the bridge to connect their works. To avoid disconnection between those roles, Chang and Du came up with Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP), an open-source project to deal with unstructured data. With the ETL tool, developers won’t need to build their own data connectors, high-maintenance model serving platform, or ETL pipeline automation tool.
Diving into the unstructured-data world, the startup connects the pipelines seamlessly
Like the tip of the iceberg, structured data accounts for 20% of the whole data. And the 20% with a predefined schema for attributes, tags, and labels, are typically stored in certain databases, such as SQL and NoSQL. The 80% left, so-called unstructured data,has suffered from neglect and led to a great loss of business opportunities.
Turning unstructured data into structured ones is resource-consuming. It takes more or less a year, from researching and implementing an AI model to implementing data collection, model training, and model evaluation. Then it takes months to continuously maintain and run the machine learning cycle for better AI performance.
VDP aims to solve the problem by automatically transforming the data process. Users send their unstructured data into VDP, and then received structured data at the end. The low-code data ETL tool empowers both data engineers and data scientists to enable flexible data integration.
Seizing opportunities in skyrocketing AI market, Instill AI applies to various industries
AI technology is taking off. According to Grand View Research, the AI market will see a US$87.4 billion worth of Total Addressable Market (TAM), with a CAGR of 40.2% from 2021 to 2028. Among these, the visual AI market will account for a US$15.9-billion value. As the AI market is soaring, Instill AI has found itself perfect for various industries.
Instill AI’s product VDP could apply to any circumstances that require the processing of unstructured data. For example, an e-commerce platform needs to classify its images. In the past, the venue should hire staff to manually label the millions of images, so as to have a structured database. But now, VDP allows e-commerce platforms to realize the work in a few minutes automatically.
Not only in the e-commerce industry, VDP now serves customers in the field of drones, service robots, cloud security cameras, manufacturing, AI content production, and so on. VDP takes care of the work for the AI team and builds infrastructure for AI products, facilitating the AI iteration.
The company's innovative solution has caught the attention of venture capital firm RTP Global, which led a $3.6 million seed round investment in Instill AI. This round is also supported by Lunar Ventures; Hive Ventures; Charles Songhurst, former corporate strategy executive and M&A execute at Microsoft; Demetrios Kellari, Head of Systems and Technology Integration at Cavnue; and Mehdi Ghissassi, Director of Product for Google's AI/ML Research org.
In 2023, Instill AI will also come up with a SaaS solution “Instill Cloud”, which take care of AI operation and realize AI empowerment for businesses. With this investment and vision, Instill AI is well-positioned to transform the way organizations approach unstructured data and make data-driven decisions.
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