Groundlight raises $10M for natural language powered computer vision

Groundlight has announced that it raised $10 million in funding and has launched its visual understanding service based on language instructions. The funding round included participation from Madrone, Greycroft Partners and Founders Co-op. 

Groundlight’s platform allows any developer, no matter their coding or programming experience, to understand images programmatically using simple English language instructions and a few lines of code. The company’s platform can be integrated into various applications like industrial automation, process monitoring, retail analytics, video stream analysis and robotics. 

Without Groundlight’s platform, developers need to gather and label a dataset, train a model and then figure out an MLOps solution to maintain it, a process that can easily take months to complete. Instead, Groundlight allows developers to get started simply by describing their visual task in natural language. The task is then instantly turned into an application-specific model.

To ensure its system is always providing the best results, Groundlight tracks the confidence of its model and continuously optimizes it using feedback from expert human monitors. The platform is currently available as a pilot service to select customers. 

“As the most powerful AI models get better, there is the tendency to think that all you need is a Large Language Model. While they make great demos, robust commercial systems need real human judgment to handle edge cases reliably. And massive LLMs are too slow and expensive to be relied on in isolation for many applications,” Groundlight founder Leo Dirac said. “Groundlight’s approach seamlessly ties together traditional deep learning with massive foundation models, edge computing, and real-time expert human supervision.”

Groundlight’s technology has already been put to use at Austere Manufacturing in Washington State, which produces cam buckles known for their high performance and lightweight quality meant to last a lifetime. 

“Quality control, process efficiency, and continuous improvement are crucial to our success. We’re excited to use Groundlight to inspect our products and monitor our processes without the development overhead of a typical industrial solution. Their API enables a $10 camera and a few lines of code to implement a working solution in minutes. Far less time than we’d spend to even evaluate an expensive industrial computer vision product,” Uriel Eisen, Founder of Austere Manufacturing, said.