Artificial intelligence (AI) data startup Synthetaic has raised $13 million and moved into a new office in downtown Delafield, the company said this week.
That office is at 505 Wells Street in downtown Delafield, in the same building as Revere's Wells Street Tavern. But next year — around summer 2023 — Synthetaic will move again into a $25 million office development in the works by Hendricks Commercial Properties, Synthetaic founder and CEO Corey Jaskolski said.
The Series A financing round was led by New York's Lupa Systems, which also led Synthetaic's $4.5 million pre-seed and seed round in 2020.
In its investor pitches, Synthetaic demonstrated its Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) technology, which enables AI insights in minutes instead of the months it typically takes, Jaskolski said.
"We turned down more money than we actually raised," Jaskolski said. "People could see that we could build AI in three minutes with our tool, and that got our investors and partners excited and made for a good raise."
Synthetaic will use some of the funding to grow its team from 23 employees currently to 30 or 35 by the end of the year, Jaskolski said. In addition to AI experts, it's hiring web developers to build an online experience that's accessible for users that don't have AI or data science expertise, he added.
The startup will also use the capital for sales and marketing to attract new long-term customers, or strategic partners, which Jaskolski believes will help the company remain competitive in the crowded AI industry, he said.
In total, Synthetaic has raised $17.5 million to date. Other investors in the Series A round were Green Bay's TitletownTech and New York City's Betaworks Ventures, which both also participated in Synthetaic's previous capital raise. New investors were Booz Allen Hamilton and Esri.
Ben FitzGerald of Lupa Systems has joined Synthetaic's board of directors, which also includes Jaskolski and a third, independent board member that hasn't yet been selected, Jaskolski said.
