Friday, 23 June 2023, Bengaluru, India
A no-code computer vision platform developed by Kibsi, an Irvine, California-based firm, will enable companies to create and use computer vision applications. Kibsi is different from many other players in this market partly because it allows companies to use their current cameras to gather data on practically anything they wish to monitor, whether it be in a warehouse, restaurant, or on an airport runway.
The business revealed today that it had secured $9.3 million in pre-seed and seed finance. GTMfund, NTTVC (which led the $4 million pre-seed round), Preface Ventures, Ridge Ventures, Secure Octane, and Wipro Ventures were the other participants in these rounds.
After the original team sold Rackspace to the AWS-focused consulting firm Onica, Tolga Tarhan, currently Kibsi’s CEO, joined Rackspace. Later, he was named CTO of the business. He concluded that his time at the company had come full circle following the Rackspace IPO. The group considered what they might construct next alongside co-founders and former Onica executives Amanda McQueen, Amir Kashani, and Eric Miller.
Tarhan told me, “I wanted to go out and create again.” Because IoT has been a significant component of our company at Onica, we wanted something with an IoT perspective. We wanted it to be software since we had already done enough consulting to last several lifetimes. Additionally, we wanted it to use AI because we believed that IoT was already essentially a thing of the past. How do we bring these things together? We concluded that many customers need help integrating computer vision as we thought about that area, our expertise there, and where we ran into problems with clients.
He said that even though big businesses have the cameras and the skill to work on models, computer vision initiatives there fail much too frequently. But it takes a lot of undifferentiated labour to ingest the stream from their cameras to run the models, and combining all of this with downstream applications poses another set of integration issues.
The team decided to create a computer vision platform that enables companies to use their current cameras and a user interface that allows users to derive practical commercial value from this data quickly. The forum will enable users to use their own or Kibsi’s computer vision models, and it then displays the findings in a fashion consistent with the intended business application, both in Kibsi’s user interface and through an API.
Customers like Owens Corning have already expressed interest in Kibsi. Although manufacturing is a natural environment for computer vision, the Kibsi team also counts the Woodland Park Zoo and Whisker among its clients. Whisker is integrating Kibsi’s technology into their litter robot.
Even though NTT, Kibsi’s backer, is a prominent player in the smart city market and there are other obvious use cases for the software, Tarhan observed lengthy sales cycles. He said there are better areas to play on day one as a startup. Developers can test Kibsi’s platform for free; a complete developer subscription starts at $99 monthly. Prospective clients must contact the business directly for premium and enterprise pricing plan information.
[Source of Information : Techcrunch.com]
