TwentyBN Raises $10 Million Series A to Build Digital Companions That Can See You

BERLIN and TORONTO, September 26, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Twenty Billion Neurons GmbH (TwentyBN), a leading provider of real-time, interactive computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, announced a $10 million Series A funding round today, led by M12, Microsoft's venture fund, with participation from Coparion, Creative Edge, and MFV Partners.

Founded in 2015, TwentyBN is building an AI system that interacts with humans while "looking" at them - enabling it to understand their behaviour, surroundings and the full context of the engagement. This AI allows people to interact with technology and each other in new and exciting ways that will impact every aspect of our lives, from our workplaces to our homes and to the interiors of our vehicles.

At the core of TwentyBN's system is the company's crowd-acting platform that allows humans to engage with and teach AI about everyday aspects of our lives and our physical world. Through crowd-acting, TwentyBN currently hosts the world's largest industry dataset with over two million annotated video clips. When combining the data with the company's deep neural networks, TwentyBN solutions provide human-like "awareness" of everyday scenes and situations - through nothing more than an RGB camera. Enterprise customers can license TwentyBN's technology to enable camera-equipped devices to understand and interact with their users in a fluent and human-like way. Nature needed millions of years to evolve a detailed understanding of the world around us; the tech world can begin building that understanding into products today using TwentyBN's AI.

"From day one, we've been committed to pushing decades of progress in AI and interactive computer vision into every corner of the world, be it the home, office, store or a robot's brain," said Roland Memisevic, CEO and chief scientist of TwentyBN. To date, the company has offerings in touchless sensing, scene understanding, and context-aware human computer interaction. With TwentyBN solutions, any camera-equipped device from smartphones to robots can understand their physical surroundings and decipher human behavior to increase safety, productivity, and comfort for people.

The Series A funding round enables TwentyBN to scale its business. "TwentyBN is advancing how deep learning based models recognize both the nouns and verbs describing a visual scene," said Samir Kumar, Managing Director at M12. "New intelligent camera experiences become possible when these models derived from their crowd-acting datasets are deployed to run efficiently on IoT edge devices."

Outside the commercial world, TwentyBN is a dedicated contributor to academic AI research, including partnerships with the MILA institute in Montreal. The company has also released two large-scale video datasets and baseline code to the public for academic purposes and licensed technology and data to research labs and corporations. More than 42 of the world's top 100 universities and 2 of the top 50 companies on Forbes Global 2000 already use TwentyBN technology for research and commercial purposes.

About TwentyBN 

TwentyBN is an artificial intelligence company with the mission of instilling common sense into computers through video understanding and of turning inanimate devices into human eyes that can understand the world around them, assist humans, and ensure a safe and healthy lifestyle. TwentyBN is based in Berlin, Germany and Toronto, Canada. For more information, please visit https://20bn.com

Contact:
Moritz Mueller-Freitag
[email protected]
+49-30-5564-3880

SOURCE Twenty Billion Neurons GmbH