AI startup LGN has secured US$2m in funding to help businesses build better and more resilient AI models, faster and at scale. Backed by automotive manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover as well as Trucks Venture Capital and Luminous Ventures, the UK-based company’s aim is to support organizations in developing their use of edge AI in the real world, rather than in the lab.
Daniel Warner, CEO and co-founder at LGN, said, “AI has huge implications for the way businesses operate, yet so much of the modeling is done in carefully controlled test environments. When deployed in real-world situations, anomalies always occur, which disrupts lab-grown models and undermines companies’ efforts to revolutionize how they use autonomous systems effectively. By scaling edge AI, optimizing the endpoints collecting the data, and making models more resilient, we are radically accelerating learning and, in doing so, giving our customers a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace.”
According to International Data Corporation (IDC), spending on AI is predicted to break the US$500bn mark by 2024. In addition, a Gartner Trend Insight Report states that more than 50% of enterprise-grade data is expected to be created and processed outside the data center or cloud by 2022. Therefore, businesses are attempting to better understand where and how they can analyze data and derive actionable insights from it.
To do that competitively requires the ability to deploy AI, specifically at the edge of their networks, and at scale. LGN helps firms make the most of the benefits of having thousands of endpoints collecting data by getting autonomous systems into the real world, learning and iterating from actual data rather than testing models in the laboratory. It does so by scaling out edge AI deployments, improving resiliency in those models and optimizing the hardware and physical devices that make up endpoints at the edge.
Delivering edge AI at scale is the first step in LGN’s mission to create networked AI. Currently, much of what AI does has to be translated so that humans can understand it and make decisions based on what it says. Networked AI is AI-to-AI communication, eliminating the need for the human element and thereby speeding up the decision-making and action processes.
Warner added, “Networked AI will change the way the world works. All the potential benefits of AI are limited while we need to involve humans in the majority of the decisions. Edge AI is the first step toward speeding up that process, by having AI at the endpoint to rapidly collect, analyze and determine action based on data. Networked AI will take that and apply it across all aspects of an organization, freeing up workers to focus on more valued-adding activities.”
Sebastian Peck, managing director at InMotion Ventures, Jaguar Land Rover’s venture capital arm, commented, “Autonomous cars represent a major innovation with the potential to revolutionize how people travel and the impact of travel on the environment. To realize it, we need to create more robust systems. LGN’s technology enables AI systems training at scale, which is critical for real-world progress.”
Trucks VC general partner, Reilly Brennan, said, “For automated vehicles to go mainstream we need edge AI to not just work, but to work at scale. LGN’s commitment to enabling resilient models that can be deployed at a fleet level is going to be critical to realizing the vision so many are moving toward.”