This Swedish startup helps autonomous vehicles see and understand its surroundings; raises €5.8M

Annotell, a Sweden-based software company has recently raised €5.8 million Series A funding led by Ernström & Co and Stena Sessan. This financing will help the company to develop its analytics and annotation platform used to ensure the performance of the perception systems part of autonomous vehicles. The Gothenburg-based startup has previously raised €1.1M in seed funding. This brings the total amount raised to €6.9M.

Training autonomous vehicles to see  

Founded in 2018 by Daniel Langkilde and Oscar Petersson, Annotell provides software to create and analyse training and validation data used to develop autonomous vehicles. 

“Autonomous vehicles depend on sensors and algorithms to see the world around them. These algorithms are trained to understand the world using examples where humans tell the computer “this is a car”, “this is a pedestrian” and so on. Annotell provides software to create and analyze training and validation data used to develop autonomous vehicles,” Daniel Langkilde, CEO and co-founder of Anotell mentions in a blogpost. 

By combining automated annotation with quality analytics and data browsing, the company’s technology reduces the development cost and shortens the production timeline without compromising safety.

“In the long-term we expect computer vision to play an increasingly big role in everything from healthcare and security to robotics and logistics. That will require even larger volumes of data, and our goal is to be part of making that future possible. That said, we know we have to be the best in the world at what we do to create value for our customers,” says Langkilde. 

Further, Annotell hired Emil Dautovic as their first VP of Sales. Emil is the former VP of Automotive at Mapillary, the computer vision-powered mapping company that was recently acquired by Facebook, and previously worked at The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), the software company that was acquired by BlackBerry. 

“The last two years since we started have been incredible, but we have a long way to go before it is simple to make sure perception systems are safe. With this investment we are in a great position to go all the way,” Langkilde notes.

Main image credits: Annotell