Inspektlabs Inc., an inspection-focused startup based on artificial intelligence or AI, has raised $600,000 (Rs 4.5 crore at current exchange rate) in a pre-Series A funding round.
The round in the United States- and Delhi-based company has been led by venture firm Better Capital and Titan Capital, the investment office of Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal.
A clutch of angel investors also participated in the funding round.
Inspektlabs, set up in 2018 by Devesh Trivedi and Sanchit, is also a part of the 2020 London Barclays Accelerator programme, which was backed by innovation and investment platform Techstars.
The company says it builds computer vision products for use in the inspection of physical assets, with its current focus being on automating the process for vehicles.
The company will use the capital it has raised for product development as well as increasing the variety of its offerings for insurance and automotive companies.
“Our products currently reduce the cost of inspection by 98% and reduce the time required for inspections by 95%,” Trivedi said, adding that the company would diversify to other assets including cellular phones and motorbikes.
The firm says its products have so far been used to inspect over one lakh cars in India, the United Kingdom and Japan.
It says it has an image and video library of over five million damaged assets, and that it has already signed contracts with two major companies in the automotive and insurance space.
Deals in the AI segment
Overall investor and strategic interest in startups employing frontier technologies such as AI and machine learning has risen in the past several years.
Last month, enterprise AI platform NextBillion AI raised $7 million (around Rs 52.89 crore) in a Series A funding round co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Falcon Edge Capital.
In May, photography firm Spyne raised pre-Series A funding from AngelList, along with participation from the Smile Group.
Also in May, multilingual AI business platform Vernacular.ai raised $5.1 million (around Rs 38 crore) in its Series A funding round. The exercise was led by Exfinity Ventures and the IAN Fund.
In April, Inflection Point Ventures bet $400,000 (around Rs 3 crore) on Vogueme Technologies Pvt Ltd, which operates video meta-tagging and analysis platform Toch.