AI Tech Start-Up Raises Millions In Capital
Off the back of its product identification technology, Australian artificial intelligence solutions provider Tiliter has raised $7.5-million in investor capital in 2020.
While it has been a tough year for many businesses, the appetite for innovative tech startups appears to be as strong as ever for investors. Tiliter is one such company, and its flagship offering is an AI product that uses a camera to recognise products without the need to scan a barcode.
Eleanor Venture, Investec, and Cornell University in New York are among the names of investors that poured $7.5-million in a funding round after the early success of Tiliter’s technology in the supermarket and retail space. Among the early adopters is Woolworths in Australia, Countdown stores in New Zealand, and New York’s Westside Market. The funding will be used to accelerate expansion plans to go deeper into the American market while also entering into Europe.
The reason Tiliter’s technology is taking off so quickly is that more and more retailers are shifting away from the traditional forms of checkout and payment to a self-checkout model. Self-checkout is popular because it increases the efficiency and speed of the checkout process; they take up less space than traditional checkout counters, require less staff, and also reduce person-to-person contact inside the store.
There are some cons, though. Customers who are maybe not particularly tech-savvy may have trouble understanding how to use a self-checkout device properly, and there is the potential for theft. Both situations can cause the loss of product or for the wrong things to be scanned and paid. Tiliter’s technology all but eradicates these issues.
In other business sectors, Adobe Photoshop has continuously been releasing AI features throughout 2020, the most noticeable of which is Sky Replacement which allows users to completely replace the sky in the background of an image with just a couple of clicks. The technology is also expected to revolutionise the home security industry in the next few years with near-flawless threat detection capabilities.
In a world where companies can have all of the pros and none of the drawbacks, it’s little wonder the use of AI has been accelerating in many business sectors, but most notably in live video streaming. Artificial Intelligence can overcome many drawbacks of online streaming, such as increasing protection of intellectual property, reducing content piracy, improving the user experience by learning their preferences, and protecting user privacy.
AI technology will be able to detect bandwidth capacity and data limitations of a particular user and then tailor their experience on a streaming service accordingly. This will allow users to have a seamless viewing experience and will lead to huge savings of data and money.
AI is an ideal solution for optimizing video streaming workflows. Artificial Intelligence is being used in both live and VOD streaming workflows, and is already saving video streamers serious money by optimizing their bandwidth use. This especially has an effect on the way people watch sports matches (since in-person attendance is limited) with many betting apps that offer live streaming.
In truth, the world is only just beginning to grasp the full potential of AI for business, and it will take some time for all of the benefits to be fully understood. But, even in its infancy, AI is having an enormous impact on the world, and this will begin to increase at an exponential rate as the understanding of artificial intelligence increases and the AIs have been given more time to learn.
“We’re just at the beginning of how AI combined with computer vision, will shape the future for brick-and-mortar and online shopping. It was important that we partner with investors that understand the new dynamics in retail innovation and the massive opportunity arising from this change,” says CEO and co-founder of Tiliter Marcel Herzsays CEO and co-founder of Tiliter Marcel Herz.
