Computer Vision startup Neurolabs has raised $3.5 million (£2.7m) in seed funding as the firm continues to expand operations.   

Led by European specialist fund LAUNCHub Ventures, the seed round also included participation from Berlin’s Lunar Ventures, Techstart and London-based 7% Ventures. 

Neurolabs said it will use the investment to further scale operations and expand its offering into several consumer-packaged goods use cases. 

Based in Edinburgh, but with offices in London & Cluj, Neurolabs harnesses synthetically generated data to develop object recognition models more efficiently.  

By substituting the expensive real-world data required to train computer vision algorithms with synthetically generated data, the firm hopes to provide massive, low-cost synthetic data sets for organisations across a range of industries, including the retail space.

Notably, Neurolabs says its out-of-the-box solution enables software engineers or citizen developers to build computer vision solutions “as easily as building a website”.

Research from Gartner suggests that synthetically generated data will overtake real-life data by 2030.  

However, unstructured visual data for AI processes in retail requires precise 3D-modeling of everyday physical objects, such as milk cartons and cereal boxes. For a machine to simply recognise an object on the shelf is not enough, according to CEO and co-founder, Paul Pop.  

“Generating synthetic data doesn’t automatically translate into working Computer Vision algorithms,” he explained. “It’s a learning process in itself and we have been perfecting it for more than two years now.”

Pop said Neurolabs is currently amassing the “largest 3D product repository” in the retail industry and aims to reach over 100,000 products by the end of 2022.  

“The sky’s the limit: a streamlined process of adding any existing product to our database in minutes is in place,” he added.  

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The investment follows an exciting period for Neurolabs. In July 2020, the firm raised €1 million in a pre-seed round co-led by Techstart and Lunar.  

Interest in the startup’s product offering has also continued to build. Earlier this year, the startup landed French discounter Auchan as a client and currently has a number of large brands in the pipeline. 

Commenting on the investment, Stan Sirakov, General Partner at LAUNCHub Ventures said Neurolabs has proven a “strong edge in object detection in different industry applications”. 

“While the Tesla’s and Googles of this world can pour into their AI operations their unmatched financial and human resources to develop next-stage consumer products like self-driving cars, there are a plethora of non-tech industries that are ripe for the latest automation technologies but struggle with adoption,” he said.   

“With an end-to-end solution so easy to implement, we see it as a way to democratize Computer Vision.”

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