Humanloop, a London-based AI startup that has created tools for businesses to integrate natural language processing (NLP) into their applications has closed a $2.6m (£2.1m) seed funding round.
Founded in 2020 by alumni from the likes of Amazon and Google, Humanloop’s goal is to “democratise” the adoption of artificial intelligence. Humanloop says its data annotation tools can speed up the training of a machine learning algorithm.
“People would be shocked if they knew what language-based AI was capable of now but getting the data into a form that the algorithm can use is the biggest challenge,” said Humanloop co-founder and CEO Raza Habib.
“With Humanloop, we want to democratise access to AI and enable the next generation of intelligent, self-serve applications – by allowing any company to take its domain expertise and distil it efficiently in a machine learning model.”
Humanloop is marketing its technology to companies that might not have the resources to build their own machine learning algorithms from scratch.
The seed round was led by VC firm Index Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, LocalGlobe and Albion VC. The new funding has gone towards the hiring of new engineers.
“What many people don’t know is that it’s not the lack of appropriate algorithms that are holding back AI from being ubiquitous in every workplace,” said Index Ventures partner Erin Price-Wright.
“Machine learning itself is becoming increasingly commoditized and off-the-shelf, but it’s still really hard for non-technical people to transmit their knowledge to a machine and help the algorithm refine its model.
Humanloop’s technology has been used across various industries, including an algorithm to scan health records to identify candidates for new therapies, moderating comments on Facebook groups, and automatically generating draft responses to customer service inquiries.
Humanloop’s product, called ‘Programmatic’ is currently being used by over 30 companies.
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