Data scientists are increasingly using "unstructured" data to train machine learning and artificial intelligence models.
As implied by its name, such data hasn't been organized, so the information that's within it can be hard to parse. But there's a lot more unstructured data available — in the form of text documents, photos and videos, among other things — and newer tools have allowed scientists to more easily build AI or ML models around such information.
The problem is that using such data can lead to errors, and scientists spend lots of time trying to clean up their data or understand the errors it generates. The folks behind Galileo Technologies Inc. think they have a solution. Galileo's software automatically finds and fixes such bugs and highlights for the scientists what it's done. That capability could save data teams hundreds of hours of time, the company says on its website.
"The biggest bottleneck and time sink for high quality ML is always around fixing the data (scientists) work with," Vikram Chatterji, the San Francisco startup's co-founder and CEO, said in a news release. "This is critical, but prohibitively manual, ad-hoc and slow, leading to poor model predictions and avoidable model biases creeping into production for the business."
Chatterji and his team were spurred to create Galileo's software from their own experiences working with machine learning models at companies including Apple Inc. and Google LLC, he said in the news release.
Some venture investors were convinced its service has potential. The company, which came out of stealth last week, announced it's raised $5.1 million in a seed deal.
Here's more on its round and other seed funding news from the past week:
Smelt Technologies Inc. (dba LootRush), San Francisco, $12 million: Paradigm led the round for this developer of games that support non-fungible tokens and reward players in cryptocurrency tokens. Andreessen Horowitz also invested.
StimScience Inc., Berkeley, $8.3 million: Khosla Ventures led the round for this developer of a wearable sleep-aid device. Monozukuri Ventures and Great Eagle Holding also participated.
Galileo Technologies Inc., San Francisco, $5.1 million: The Factory led the round for this provider of software that analyzes and detects errors in machine learning models. Kaggle Inc. CEO Anthony Goldbloom also invested.
Manara, Berkeley, $3 million: Stripe Inc. led the round for this job board that pairs tech companies with software engineers based in the Middle East and North Africa.
