Autonomous-Vehicle Software Startup Annotell Secures $24M Investment

Autonomous-vehicle software company Annotell has closed a $24 million series A financing round co-led by tech investors Metaplanet and NordicNinja.

Existing investors Stena Sessan AB and Ernström & Co. also contributed to the round, bringing the Swedish startup’s total capital raised to more than $31 million.

Annotell, which was founded in 2018 by engineering physicists Oscar Petersson and Daniel Langkilde, provides a software platform that helps developers of automated-driving and advanced-driver-assistance systems ensure the accuracy of the perception data their systems rely on to navigate safely.

The company, which is headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, and has a development office in Munich, expects to expand its existing team to 100 employees by the end of the year. So far, some of “the world’s largest OEMs, T1s, sensor makers and AV companies rely on our category-leading software and data when developing their perception systems,” Annotell said.

A key component of Annotell’s platform is its annotation tools, which are capable of processing vast amounts of image data through high-level machine-assisted labeling. The images collected go through several steps on the annotation platform before being delivered to clients in order to eliminate or at least significantly reduce the possibility of errors in the data. 

The platform also uses analytics to produce detailed quality and distribution statistics of a client’s perception datasets. These statistics enable the client to craft, analyze and evaluate various metrics to ensure their sensors meet requirements.

Annotell is developing new products to handle an increasing number of aspects of perception-data quality to increase a customer’s engineering speed and lower their development costs while ensuring safety. 

“Knowing how much you can trust your data is an essential part of building a safe autonomous system,” the company said. “For autonomous vehicles, that means knowing how certain you are about what the world looks like around you. Our software makes knowing that possible.”