While AI and computer vision research has progressed faster than anyone could have imagined over the past decade, the deployment of products in fields like autonomous vehicles, robotics, agriculture, manufacturing, augmented reality, and medical imaging has taken much longer than expected.
Companies like Scale.ai, Weights & Biases, and Hugging Face and projects like Tensorflow and Pytorch have made it easy to train and deploy powerful AI (Deep Learning) models over the last years. However, to make these models work in products for the physical world, you need tools to visualize how all algorithms behave. Behemoths like Apple, Meta, and Tesla can afford to invest large sums in proprietary visualization infrastructure, but smaller companies lack the resources to build their own.
That’s why we are excited to back Rerun, a Swedish startup that is creating a more modern version of those expensive tools for the rest of the industry to enable everyone to bring great AI products to the physical world. Rerun aims to do for the computer vision industry what gaming engines, such as Unity, did for the gaming industry.
Founded earlier this year by Emil Ernerfeldt (CTO), Nikolaus West (CEO), and Moritz Schiebold (COO), computer vision veterans and former team mates at 3D body-scanning startup Volumental, Rerun is an open source toolbox that helps developers build powerful visualizations of their computer vision software in the physical world.
It makes complex software understandable by visualizing it over space and time in a way that is intuitive for humans. Super easy to use and extensible when needed, the toolbox helps large teams move faster and small teams get off the ground.
On why we invested, our Partner Tom Wilson comments:
“The potential for the use of computer vision in the physical world is immense. However, the tooling required to bring solutions leveraging this cutting edge technology to market is limited, costly and often highly complex. We believe Rerun can be a defining company in helping to unleash the real power of computer vision applied to the physical world and empower a new generation of builders in the space.”
We are excited to participate in Rerun’s pre-seed round led by Silicon Valley VC Costanoa Ventures, alongside an exceptional cohort of angels, including Jan Erik Solem (sold Polar Rose to Apple and Mapillar to Meta), Luc Vincent (VP of Engineering and Product Group Lead, AI at Meta), Sune Alstrup (sold The Eye Tribe to Oculus), Alper Aydemir, CEO and Co-Founder of Volumental, and a host of founders of leading computer vision and machine learning companies.
Rerun plans to use the fresh funds to hire a founding team of developers to build the first version of our product.
For more information and to see the available opportunities to join the team, visit rerun.io
