Frontline Ventures among those backing Understand.AI in $2.8m round

Dublin and London- based early-stage B2B venture-capital firm Frontline Ventures has taken part in a $2.8 million (€2,28 million) funding seed funding round for machine-learning firm Understand.AI.

Headquartered in Karlsruhe, Germany, Understand.AI, is involved in changing how training data is generated by developing deep learning machine algorithms to annotate image and video data for autonomous driving vehicles.

LEA Partners, a German multi-stage VC firm, led the funding round with other investors including Frontline, Synapse Partners and Agile Partners.

"AI systems aren't intelligent on their own. They need to be trained to be smart" said Understand.AI chief executive Marc Mengler said.

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“The problem is that currently thousands of click-workers manually colour millions of pixels in an image, which is time-consuming, costly and error-prone. At Understand.AI we push the boundaries of technology and AI, to help our customers reach level 5 fully-autonomous driving significantly faster,” he added.

Frontline, which is led by Will Prendergast and is one of the most active investors in the Irish market, last year announced a second €60 million funding round for pre-seed and seed companies in Ireland, the UK and mainland Europe.

Its Fund I was raised in 2013, and invested in 27 software firms across Europe.

Among Frontline’s recent investments include Drop and Brightflag. It has also invested in the likes of Logentries, Orchestrate.io, Qstream, PageFair, Boxever, Pointy and CurrencyFair.