AIMMO, a Korean startup, uses software and humans to label and categorize image, video, sound, text, and sensor fusion data. It has built an AI data annotation platform, enabling data labeling faster for enterprises.
The company announced recently that it has raised $12 million in a Series A round. It plans to use this to advance its data labeling technology and spur global expansions. Seven venture capital firms participated in the latest round. DS Asset Management, Industrial Bank of Korea, Hanwha Investment & Securities, S&S Investment, Toss Investment, Korea Asset Investment & Securities, and Venture Field.
About the Korean startup AIMMO
Chief Executive Officer SeungTaek Oh founded the company in 2016. The startup has three data annotation tools. AIMMO DaaS, which manages sensor fusion data for autonomous vehicle corporations; AIMMO GtaaS, a turnkey-based platform for big data; and AIMMO Enterprises, launched in 2020, a web-based SaaS annotation labeling tool using cloud architecture.
The startup said its tools help improve the inefficiency of the data annotation process. So, the customers can focus only on their AI modeling. There’s no platform fee, coding skills, and installation required for AIMMO Enterprises that users can label their data via browsers like Chrome. As for its AIMMO GtaaS, users send raw data to AIMMO that labels the data with the inspection. And delivers it back to the customers, Chung said. Through the AIMMO DaaS platform, its sales and volume of its data labeling increased by 200% in 2021 compared to the previous year. AIMMO posted $10 million of revenue in 2021, according to its IR pitch deck. The company expects its growth in 2022, with the global demand for the autonomous driving field continually increasing.
Market size for data collection and labelling
The global data collection and labeling market size was valued at $1.6 billion in 2021. It is projected to reach $8.2 billion in 2028, according to a market analysis report by Grand View Research.
AIMMO works with an array of companies, including carmaker Hyundai Motor, car parts developer Hyundai Mobis, car-hailing startup Kakao Mobility, car-sharing startup SoCar and autonomous cargo developer ThoreDrive. AIMMO also works with non-autonomous vehicle companies in robotics, optical character recognition (OCR), smart factory, intelligent surveillance, e-commerce, and logistics industries, like telco corporation SK Telecom, internet giants Naver and Kakao, and Japanese Komatsu. The Korea-headquartered startup has offices in the U.K, the U.S., Japan, and Vietnam. Chung said it also plans to open offices in Germany and Canada in 2022. AIMMO will compete with companies like Scale AI, Playment, Understand.ai, and Deepen AI when it expands further to the global market. Today, the startup has 200 employees across the globe and more than 10,000 data labelers