Swedish startup Rerun that develops open source visualization infrastructure for computer vision and robotics has raised €3.2M in a preseed round led by CA-based Costanoa Ventures. The round saw participation from Europe’s seed fund Seedcamp and angel investors including Jan Erik Solem, Luc Vincent, Sune Alstrup, Alper Aydemir alongside many founders. This capital injection will enable the startup company expand its team. Rerun will help AI teams succeed with products in the physical world.
Rerun’s mission
Founded earlier this year by Emil Ernerfeldt (CTO), Nikolaus West (CEO), and Moritz Schiebold (COO), computer vision veterans and former team mates at 3D body-scanning startup Volumental, Rerun is an open source toolbox that helps developers build powerful visualizations of their computer vision software in the physical world.
It makes complex software understandable by visualizing it over space and time in a way that is intuitive for humans. Super easy to use and extensible when needed, the toolbox helps large teams move faster and small teams get off the ground.
“I met my co-founders Niko and Moritz at a computer vision and 3D scanning company where we wrote some really cool in-house visualization tools. We used these tools to quickly iterate when prototyping new algorithms, investigating weird corner cases, and to troubleshoot our deployed scanners. These tools were critical to our success, but took a lot of effort to write.
We’ve since learned that all successful computer vision companies build their own in-house visualization tools. This costs them time and effort, and produces tools that aren’t as good as they should be. We want to change that!” states Emil Ernerfeldt, CTO at Rerun.
20 years ago, if you had an idea for a game, you had to first write a game engine. This stopped most people, and slowed down the rest. Today there are reusable game engines such as Unity and Unreal, and there has been an explosion of great games coming from thousands of studios and indie developers. At Rerun, they are going to write a reusable visualization toolbox for the entire computer vision industry.
Computer vision is going to diagnose illnesses, enable blind people to read street signs, replace insecticides with bug-zapping lasers, power autonomous drones that do repairs in remote and dangerous areas, and on and on. Computer vision is on the cusp of revolutionizing the world, and Rerun will be at the heart of it.
“The potential for the use of computer vision in the physical world is immense. However, the tooling required to bring solutions leveraging this cutting edge technology to market is limited, costly and often highly complex. We believe Rerun can be a defining company in helping to unleash the real power of computer vision applied to the physical world and empower a new generation of builders in the space.” comments Tom Wilson, Partner at Seedcamp.
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