Voxel51, a startup developing a platform to analyze unstructured data, such as images and videos, has raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by Drive Capital, with participation from Top Harvest, Shasta Ventures, eLab Ventures and ID Ventures. Founder and CEO Jason Corso tells TechCrunch that the new capital will be put toward further developing the company's platform and doubling the size of Voxel51's team from 13 to 26 employees by year-end. Corso says he, alongside machine learning PhD Brian Moore, created Voxel51 to harness the growing flood of unstructured data in AI and machine learning. A professor at the University of Michigan, Corso says he saw a "critical need" for better software infrastructure to support machine learning engineers and data scientists in visualizing, analyzing and understanding their data. "Leveraging unstructured and visual data is a significant challenge. Although we've seen recent wins in the transition of capabilities from the lab to production, such as those in ADAS, there remains a difficulty in bringing computer vision capabilities into production," Corso told TechCrunch in an email interview.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Computer vision AI models rely on having properly labeled data in order to infer the correct object. The challenge of helping to verify that data used for a model is accurate is one that Ann Arbor, Michigan-based startup Voxel51 is aiming to solve with open-source tools and a commercial service called FiftyOne Teams. Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan, which is where Voxel51 cofounder and CEO Jason Corso works as a professor, and where he got the idea to build the new company.