The founder of Google Brain research lab, Andrew Ng, has raised $57 million in Series A funding for his startup — Landing AI, led by McRock Capital, the first investment firm focused exclusively on the Industrial IoT.
AI pioneer Andrew Ng’s startup provides tools that make building and deploying AI systems in manufacturing faster and easier.
“I’m thrilled LANDING AI has closed a $57M Series A for our Data-centric MLOps platform for computer vision. Industrial AI needs a different recipe than Internet companies. It’s time to make cutting-edge AI fast and easy for anyone to use,” said Andrew Ng, Founder & CEO of Landing AI in a post.
The new investment will be used to accelerate product innovation as well as grow engineering and operations teams within Landing AI, including engineering, product, sales, and marketing.
In addition, New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners, Taiwania Capital, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), Intel Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Far Eastern Group’s DRIVE Catalyst, Walsin Lihwa, and AI Fund all participated in the round.
Landing AI, led by artificial intelligence visionary, Andrew Ng, developed LandingLens™, a fast, easy to use enterprise MLOps platform. It applies AI and deep learning to help manufacturers solve visual inspection problems, find product defects more reliably, and generate business value.
“You don’t always need big data to win with AI. You need good data that teach the AI what you want it to learn,” said Ng. “AI built for 50 million data points doesn’t work when you only have 50 data points. By bringing machine learning to everyone regardless of the size of their data set, the next era of AI will have a real-world impact on all industries.”
“Landing AI will unleash the power of the Industrial IoT one company, one factory, and one manufacturing line at a time,” said Scott MacDonald, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of McRock Capital. “We partner with relentless entrepreneurs, like Andrew, who bring transformative digital technologies to large industrial markets.” As part of the financing, MacDonald has joined the Landing AI Board of Directors.
The data-centric approach of Landing AI is also key to making LandingLens fast and easy to use. The process of engineering the data, instead of the AI software, gives an efficient way for manufacturers to teach an AI model what to do. Domain experts, not just AI experts, can now build an AI system and take it to production. For example, rather than needing to write pages of code to train a neural network, a domain expert can do it with a few mouse clicks.
This no code/low code data-centric platform enables new users to build advanced AI models in less than a day. Vision inspection projects that used to take over a year can be executed in just weeks using LandingLens.
