Fritz AI, a startup providing an AI and machine learning development platform for Android and iOS, today announced that it has raised $5 million. CEO Dan Abdinoor says that the capital will accelerate Fritz’s expansion as it launches its product out of early access, which he asserts addresses the challenges of mobile AI for businesses with toolkits that facilitate development, management, and execution.
Successfully deploying AI and machine learning models to production isn’t often a walk in the park. In a recent study conducted by IDC analysts, only 25% of organizations said they’d successfully adopted an enterprise-wide AI strategy, and it’s estimated that 50% of companies spend between 8 and 90 days developing a single AI model.
To address this challenge, Fritz provides a cross-platform software development kit (SDK) with pretrained models for object detection, image segmentation, image labeling, style transfer, pose estimation, and more baked in. Using its end-to-end suite for building and deploying custom trained models, developers can generate and collect labeled data sets and train optimized models without code, and they can improve those models with fresh data uploaded continuously.
Apple and Google offer mobile machine learning solutions in Core ML and ML Kit, respectively, but they’re platform-specific. Plus, Fritz’s prebuilt models don’t require an internet connection, and they run atop live video with “a fast frame rate.” All of them optionally perform inference on-device and come in several sizes, from small models tailored for size and bandwidth to fast models optimized for processing speed.
Fritz enables customers to generate synthetic data or collect data for annotation and to benchmark on-device model performance before deployment. It supports the deployment of model versions to test devices while training and tracks the configurations, and it protects models from attackers while improving those running on-device by analyzing platform, device, and processor performance.
Among Fritz’s customers are Momento, One Bite, Video Star, PlantVillage, MDacne, Superimpose X, and Instasaber, who’ve used its workflows to develop models that change hair color in real time, replace photo backgrounds, identify food like pizza, detect pets, and create stickers for messaging apps. The company has a rival in Polarr, which last year raised $11.5 million for its offline, on-device computational photography that’s used by companies including Qualcomm, Oppo, and Hober. But Abdinoor asserts that Fritz has a competitive advantage in the breadth of its product portfolio.
Foundry Group led Boston, Massachusetts-based Fritz’s latest round with participation from NextGen Venture Partners, Inner Loop Capital, Eniac Ventures, Uncork Capital, and Hack VC, which brings the company’s total raised to $7 million. Fritz has about 24 employees.
Author: Kyle Wiggers.
Source: Venturebeat
