neptune.ai – metadata store for MLOps – spun out of deepsense.ai, has raised $8 million in series A funding led by Almaz Capital with the participation of the existing investors: btov Partners, Rheingau Founders, and TDJ Pitango Ventures.

Led by Piotr Niedźwiedź, neptune.ai offers companies dedicated metadata storage that provides a central place to log, store, display, organize, share, compare, and query all metadata generated during the lifecycle of a machine learning model.

Since its launch in 2017, the store has brought in more than 20,000 ML engineers and 100 commercial customers, including Roche, NewYorker, Nnaisense and InstaDeep. The platform usage has grown eightfold over the past eight months while revenue has surged by four times.

“I am super proud of this, another great achievement for Piotr Niedźwiedź and his outstanding team. I have known Piotr since early 2011 when we established our first company together. Now, more than 11 years later, our passion has evolved into a strong group of cool tech companies – including, but not limited to: neptune.ai, deepsense.ai, CodiLime and Dealavo – with proven track records in delivery of professional IT services and products.  I feel this is still just the beginning of a fantastic adventure and our joint journey to the moon, as Piotr used to call neptune.ai. Dear Stakeholders – please fasten your seatbelts and keep your eyes open (and fingers crossed)!”
– Tomasz Kułakowski, CEO, deepsense.ai

The deepsense.ai team of Paulina Knut, Jakub Bartczuk, and Michał Zobniów won first place in the international data science competition AI Blitz 13.

The 13th edition of AI Blitz was focused on five computer vision challenges around face recognition:

• Sentiment Classification – training AI to identify emotions from a face’s convolutional neural network embedding,
• Age Prediction – building models to guess the approximate age of a person given their image,
• Mask Prediction – identifying and recognizing mask type and bounding box from the image of a face,
• Face Recognition – finding the target face in a collage of 100 photos. Some of the faces were artificially aged,
• Face De-blurring – restoring blurred face images.

“We love taking part in data science competitions, because it’s always a great opportunity to develop new skills and challenge ourselves. So, it was a pleasure to take up the AI Blitz challenge, especially since real-world computer vision is extremely close to us,”
– Paulina Knut, Senior Data Scientist at deepsense.ai

The competition ran for two weeks and the final leaderboard was calculated by the weighted mean of the rank across all the problems in the contest.

“I think that the agile approach helped us maintain the leading position in the competition. We tried to quickly and creatively apply models for all five challenges. It was both fun and a good experience for us for the future,”
– Jakub Bartczuk, Data Scientist at deepsense.ai

AI Blitz started as a beginner-friendly challenge to help AI students, professionals, and researchers across the world learn new skills by solving real-world problems. In past editions over 2600 participants have made more than 14500 submissions across several countries.

In the material “Succeed with Poland. The information and communications technology sector”, prepared by the Polish Investment and Trade Agency (PAIH), deepsense.ai was named as a Success Story next to such champions as Blik and CD Projekt Red.

“We are proud of this distinction and we treat it primarily as a motivation to continue working on the development of deepsense.ai”
– Tomasz Kułakowski, CEO at deepsense.ai.

The Polish Investment and Trade Agency (PAIH) supports both the foreign expansion of Polish business and the inflow of FDI into Poland. Supporting entrepreneurs, the Agency assists in overcoming administrative and legal procedures, related to specific projects as well as helps to develop legal solutions, find a suitable location, reliable partners and suppliers.

The brochure can be viewed here:

Tomasz Kułakowski, CEO, summarizes last year and outlines deepsense.ai’s plans for 2022.

In 2021, business still operated in the “pandemic mode”. Was 2021 different than 2020 for deepsense.ai?

Nobody expected the pandemic to last this long. From a business point of view, in 2020 we did everything we could to endure this difficult time, with the great hope that 2021 would bring a return to the old, pre-pandemic reality. Meanwhile, another year of the pandemic has passed. It teaches humility and an agile approach to business development.

As far as developing the deepsense.ai strategy is concerned, in 2021 we started to take full advantage of all the opportunities brought by the pandemic. Paradoxically, remote work has reduced the distance between us and new, potential Customers. More Clients changed their perspective and realised that working with a partner from the other side of the globe can be as effective as working with a supplier from the same country. Not only that – with tools such as G Suite, Zoom, Slack etc. used widely by our Clients as internal collaborative tools, yet allowing seamless collaboration with us – we have become full-fledged team members. The outlook for deepsense.ai development has become even more global.

What are you most proud of from the past year?

In a way, I am repeating my answer from last year, because I am still more than proud of the People who make up deepsense.ai. The dynamic development of deepsense.ai is our common success and I am glad to see the constant enthusiasm and commitment.

I am also satisfied with the development of our portfolio of projects. In 2021 we grew by 55% and we won some new Customers – global brands – that trusted us in automating key business processes. Additionally, we have deepened our cooperation with existing Clients. I am pleased that our clients are increasingly thinking about long-term cooperation with us. For many, we have become not just an AI vendor for one-off AI implementation, but an AI partner involved in building competitive advantage through data analysis and automation.

Moreover, with the challenges of remote/hybrid work models and tech recruitment becoming more and more demanding, it has been increasingly difficult for some of our Clients to cater to their AI needs relying only on internal resources. I am happy that with our help, together, we were able to streamline new developments and jumpstart all the exciting projects that we get to do as partners.

The pandemic has forced a change in the approach to doing businesses in almost every industry. In my opinion, it has resulted in even greater openness to AI-driven solutions. Clients appreciate that thanks to cooperation with us, they do not have to waste time on long-term and costly in-house AI team-building. It enables the rapid achievement of visible results, crucial in times of uncertainty.

What are deepsense.ai’s plans for 2022?

We plan to continue our development in the areas of computer vision, natural language processing, and predictive analytics, through the implementation of both commercial and research projects.

We are looking at some interesting trends that might affect the future shape of the industry. I specifically mean the rise in importance of the MLOps field that signifies a growing maturity of the AI ecosystem. We are seeing a shift from curious experimentation towards mature pipelines and maintainability. This has aligned well with the emergence of powerful language modeling methods that will further widen the possibilities in NLP-based solutions.

I am optimistic about the development of deepsense.ai in 2022 and I already know that this year will bring us many interesting projects and challenges.

Once again deepsense.ai is a ML in PL conference partner. As it does every year, the event is focused on discussions around machine-learning best practices both in academia and in business.

The 2021 edition will feature outstanding international experts, including: Yoshua Bengio (Full Professor at Université de Montreal), Marta Kwiatkowska (Professor at University of Oxford), Rich Caruana (Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft) as well as Marta Garnelo (Research Scientist at DeepMind). On behalf of deepsense.ai at the event, Robert Bogucki, CTO, will take part in the discussion “Prospects for ML in Poland: education and work”.

The event is organized by the ML in PL Association – a non-profit organization devoted to fostering the machine learning community in Poland and promoting a deep understanding of ML methods.