Image credit: Unitary homepage
Unitary, the London-based startup specializing in AI-driven visual content moderation, has just raised an impressive $15 million in a Series A funding round. The company has demonstrated the promise of using contextual AI to automate content moderation. It effectively identifies and eliminates harmful content, thus safeguarding the online experience.
Expanding in Size and Languages
The funding round was led by Creandum from Stockholm. It also had participation from Paladin Group Capital and Plural. This coincides with Unitary’s expansion across multiple languages, a notable increase in their team size to 53 members. They also showed a remarkable threefold boost in their daily video classification capacity. This capacity now stands at 6 million videos per day.
AI that Understands Context
Unitary, founded in 2019 by Sasha Haco and James Thewlis, has capitalized on the immense power of AI to revolutionize content moderation. Their proprietary AI technology can ‘read’ the context of user-generated videos. It effectively distinguishes between various types of content. Whether it’s footage from a white supremacist rally or documentary material highlighting the perils of such actions, all of this is accomplished without human intervention.
Sasha Haco, co-founder, and CEO of Unitary, expressed their vision:
“Our vision is for ethical, empathetic AI to enhance how visual content is experienced online. We’ve always focused on how we might be able to use AI to ensure a safer online experience and keep up with the pace of internet content. This funding enables us to stay at the forefront of video understanding research. It also allows us to fulfill our mission of making the internet better.”
Timely Development
New regulations in both the European Union and the UK require online platforms to identify and remove illegal content. Failure to comply can result in substantial penalties. This situation has opened up an enormous market for Unitary’s AI-driven content moderation system.
Unitary’s AI models offer a nuanced understanding of content that is similar human comprehension. This approach has garnered significant interest from investors. It culminated in their recent $15 million funding round.
With the UK’s Online Safety Bill and the EU’s Digital Services Act in full effect, companies must now comply with stringent content moderation regulations. Unitary’s machine learning system provides a means to efficiently scan and categorize online content. This ensures compliance with these rules. It also facilitates the flagging of risky videos and images.
AI Might be the Future of Moderation
Unitary’s system operates through an API that allows customers to submit content for analysis. The multi-modal models then analyze the imagery and return a classification to the client. The customer can then decide the appropriate action, whether it’s content removal, audience restriction, or user warnings.
The scale and complexity of video content, which constitutes 80% of internet traffic, are expected to increase tenfold between 2020 and 2025. Human reviewers are ill-equipped to handle such a deluge of content. This makes AI-driven moderation the future.
Sasha Haco envisions Unitary as a foundational service. It not only caters to social media firms but also extends its reach to ad verification platforms, influencer marketing companies, and dating apps. With the content landscape evolving and regulations tightening, Unitary’s role as a crucial content understanding layer across the internet is set to expand. In Haco’s words:
“If Cloudflare is the middleware layer providing speed and security of traffic, Unitary is providing the safety and understanding of content.”
