Synthetaic closes $15M Series B funding round

Synthetaic, a five-year-old artificial intelligence and data analytics startup, has completed a Series B funding round that fetched $15 million.

Lupa Systems and TitletownTech co-led the round that also involved participation from the corporate venture capital arms of IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton, the latter of which first backed Synthetaic in 2022.

Delafield, Wisconsin-headquartered Synthetaic said Tuesday it will use this new capital to accelerate customer acquisition efforts and the development of the company's flagship product called RAIC, short for Rapid Automatic Image Categorization.

RAIC works to quickly identify images or objects within them through the analysis of data sources such as satellite imagery, full-motion video, drone photography, infrared thermography and other types.

The tool made headlines in early 2023 when it helped track down the Chinese spy balloon that flew over the U.S. by going through 18 trillion pixels of Earth observation imagery, work that only started with a hand-drawn sketch.

Synthetaic says RAIC only needed 2 minutes to return a match and its finding formed the basis of this New York Times investigation that looked at the balloon's path.

“The next chapter is about bringing that technology to market so that companies across all industries can find the seemingly impossible answers locked inside their visual datasets,” Synthetaic's founder and chief executive Corey Jaskolski said in a release.

When Booz Allen first invested in Synthetaic, both companies said they sought to further iterate RAIC for dual-use across public sector and commercial markets.

Synthetaic today touts the Air Force as a user of RAIC, while Microsoft and geospatial imagery partner Planet Labs are in the partnership network.