Palo Alto-based company Landing AI announced Monday that it raised $57 million in fresh financing. The Series A, led by McRock Capital, will be used to accelerate product innovation as well as expand the Andrew Ng-led company’s headcount.
Landing’s machine learning operations (MLOps) platform provides manufacturers with digital tools to help them solve visual inspection problems and find product defects. These tools work to quickly deploy artificial intelligence systems in the manufacturing industry. Landing’s tech is also low-code, which enables manufacturers to easily program an AI system to do what they need it to do.
To achieve this, Landing works with small data sets. Historically, AI requires large sets of data in order to train models, which can present smaller companies with a huge roadblock. A lot of companies across the manufacturing industry lack access to larger sets of data. Moreover, the same AI technology can’t be universally applied across the industry, since most manufacturing plants are working to produce a specific product. Plants producing phones can’t rely on the same AI to run their operations as plants producing television sets, for example.
“You don’t always need big data to win with AI. You need good data that teaches the AI what you want it to learn,” Ng, the founder and CEO of Landing AI, said in a statement.
Smaller data sets enable those using machine visioning on manufacturing lines to quickly identify defects, according to the company. With its small data approach, Landing can also lend a hand to other industries that lack access to larger amounts of data. Take into account those working in agriculture or healthcare, for example.
“AI built for 50 million data points doesn’t work when you only have 50 data points,” Ng continued. “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.”
Ng previously was the founding lead of Google Brain, is a general partner at AI Fund and also co-founded edtech giant Coursera.
Landing plans to expand its team as it continues to scale. The 75-person company is now hiring for 11 open positions spanning its marketing, product, engineering and HR teams. Following the latest raise, Landing plans to double down on hiring across those same departments.
Additional investors Insight Partners, Taiwania Capital and Intel Capital participated in the round, among others.
