Kognic is announcing our €5.8M Seed Funding round

We just closed a €5.8 million Seed Funding round to enable us to accelerate our global expansion. 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.

For consumers to trust autonomous vehicles they need to be objectively safe.

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. Kognic provides software to create and analyze training and validation data used to develop autonomous vehicles.

Time to market matters when developing autonomous vehicles. At the same time, safety is not negotiable. Training a car to see and understand its surroundings requires huge amounts of recorded, simulated, and annotated data, making it a cumbersome process that slows down carmakers across the board. By combining highly automated annotation with detailed quality analytics and data browsing, our technology reduces the development cost and shortens the production timeline without compromising safety. Our business is maybe not the easiest to explain, but we are certain the importance of quantifying safety will grow in importance as autonomous vehicles become more common on roads around the world.

We are very happy to partner with Swedish investors Ernström & Co and Stena Sessan in this funding round. They are both strong, long-term investors that share our values. We’re proud to have built a company with its base in Gothenburg, Sweden that is at the same time at the forefront of global technology development. Gothenburg has a lot of software, engineering and business talent. As a company focused on the next generation of mobility, Gothenburg is a great base.

We are also very excited to have Emil Dautovic join the team as our 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 potential of what we are doing goes far beyond autonomous vehicles. 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.

That’s why we focus exclusively on autonomous vehicles - to make sure Kognic provides the world's best analytics and annotation platform for ensuring the performance of autonomous vehicle perception systems.