Training and Verification Data Innovator understand.ai raises 2.8 million USD investment to accelerate the process of creating autonomous driving data

San Francisco/Karlsruhe, January 16, 2018. understand.ai, a machine-learning startup for training and validation data in autonomous vehicles, announced a 2.8 million USD seed investment round led by LEA Partners. Further investors include Frontline Ventures, Synapse Partners and Agile Partners.

A leading supplier of image and video data for autonomous vehicles, understand.ai is changing how training data is generated, focusing on a combined human-machine approach to increase efficiency in data labelling, and reduce margins for error. 

“AI systems aren't intelligent on their own. They need to be trained to be smart” understand.ai CEO Marc Mengler said. “The problem is that currently thousands of click-workers manually color millions of pixels in an image – which is time-consuming, costly and error-prone. At understand.ai we push the boundaries of technology and AI, to help our customers reach level 5 fully-autonomous driving significantly faster.”

Christian Roth, Managing Partner at LEA Partners, added: “We are hugely impressed by understand.ai’s vision and the quality and depth of the underlying technology. The team has developed a state of the art proprietary Deep Learning method which makes it unique in the market and we are very excited for the future of this industry and the understand.ai solution.”

Headquartered in Germany, the heart of the European automotive industry, the understand.ai team has a deep technical understanding of the industry with a renowned team hailing from major industry players, the Karlsruhe Institute of Tech, and other prominent European universities. Clients include major Automotive OEMs and Tier one suppliers in Germany and the USA.

"With our investment understand.ai will further develop their team and accelerate their expansion, especially in the US. With Jan Hichert from Agile Partners, we were also able to win a successful serial entrepreneur from our network, who will closely follow the further development of the company as a Board Member", stated Sebastian Müller, Managing Partner at LEA Partners.

LEA Partners investiert in HCM Software Anbieter LANDWEHR

German technology investor LEA Partners, with its LEA Mittelstandspartner Fund and together with the long-standing LANDWEHR management team, has invested in the LANDWEHR Group. The founding family will retain a significant minority stake in the company.

About Frontline Ventures

Frontline is an early-stage B2B venture capital firm powered by people - the ambitious founders we invest in, our strong networks of industry experts, and our own passionate team of ex-operators. Based in London and Dublin, Frontline backs companies throughout Europe. As a team, we strive to unlock the power of collective intelligence through our innovative platform - we believe in bridging the gap between technical and human, providing both capital and experience to shorten our entrepreneurs’ learning curves. With deep connections in the US, Frontline provides a wealth of knowledge and content around international expansion and we invest time and money into building the relationships needed to fast-track expansion, from investors to recruiters to other founders. Frontline is supported by the European Investment Fund.

About LEA Partners

LEA Partners is a multi-stage private equity and venture capital firm investing in growth technology and software companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. Founded in 2002, LEA has advised on the investment in more than 40 companies. Operating out of Karlsruhe, one of Europe’s largest IT clusters, its mission is to fund and support ambitious founders and executives by leveraging them with practical, hands-on growth expertise to achieve market leadership.