Synthetaic
Leadership: Corey Jaskolski, founder and chief executive officer
Headquarters: Delafield
What it does: A data company that grows large, high-quality datasets sufficient for machine learning
Founded: 2019
Employees: 24
Next Goal: Scale the RAIC platform, enter new strategic partnerships
Funding: Recently closed a $13 million Series A round. Has raised a total of $17.5 million.
Corey Jaskolski, founder and CEO of Delafield-based Synthetaic, believes the way artificial intelligence is generated today is not a sustainable method.
“It’s always been (you) have humans draw boxes around millions and millions of things and then the computer can basically learn how to find those things in imagery,” Jaskolski said. “The problem is that as AI has gotten better and better, what’s really happened is the AI models have gotten bigger and bigger.”
This creates a dilemma as most companies don’t have the number of employees needed to label data or the funding to take on such a task.
“You’re looking at a six-month wait time and millions of dollars before you have any idea if your AI is going to work,” Jaskolski said.
Synthetaic’s Rapid Automatic Image Categorization platform fast tracks the process of creating AI. RAIC combines high-fidelity 3D modeling and novel, generative AI to grow large and high-quality datasets sufficient for machine learning. The platform has been particularly useful in industries that have a lot of unlabeled data, including in conservation and climate change efforts and in medicine.
Synthetaic recently closed a $13 million Series A financing round that included an investment from Green Bay-based TitletownTech. This funding will be used to continue to scale the RAIC platform and seek new strategic partnerships with companies that capture satellite data or are involved in AI training.
The target for the funding round was originally $12 million. Jaskolski said the company ended up taking on $13 million because they wanted to make room for a strategic investor – a company that Jaskolski didn’t name but described as one of the biggest geospatial analytic and mapping organizations in the world.
Synthetaic leadership also ended up turning down more money than they raised. There were offers totaling more than another $13 million that weren’t accepted so the company could stay within their budget. Jaskolski attributed this abundance of interest to the ease of showcasing the RAIC platform’s abilities.
“We have a really good product-market fit and we can demonstrate our tool set to our investors on the fly,” he said. “They know it (normally) takes six months to build an AI.”
Moving forward, the company wants to continue to change the way AI is generated. To do so, Jaskolski wants to expand his team to include more tech professionals. Synthetaic currently employs 24 people. That number is expected to grow to around 35 by the end of the year, and the company is moving to a new location at 525 Main St. in downtown Delafield by next summer. The different ways the RAIC platform is used is also expected to grow.
“With everything that is going on in Ukraine, there’s really an interesting opportunity for AI and satellite data,” Jaskolski said. “Twenty years ago, if something was going on in another country, it would be common for the invading country to say, ‘No, that’s not true.’ Now, there’s satellite data that we can all see.”
