NOVEMBER 1 2021

Published in the Australian Financial Review

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A Sydney-based computer-vision start-up backed by the CIA has closed a multimillion-dollar seed funding round and hired a CEO in Silicon Valley.

Visionary Machines, which says it has technology that uses arrays of cameras for 3D spatial sensing that is more accurate and robust than competing technology, raised $7.5 million in a seed funding round led by the local venture capital fund Folklore Ventures, with co-investment by Our Innovation Fund.

The start-up’s existing investors, Significant Capital Ventures, along with Thorney Investment Group and IQT International Australia, also chipped in.

IQT is the Sydney arm of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm founded by the CIA and said to be named after the fictional technology designer from James Bond, Q. In-Q-Tel has a stated mission “to enhance and advance national security for the US and its allies”.

Amir Mashkoori, the newly appointed, Silicon Valley-based CEO of Visionary Machines, told The Australian Financial Review he could not comment on why the CIA was taking an interest in the company, but “we are so grateful to have such strong backers who see the potential of our technology”.

The technology, which is still under development, uses clusters of up to 16 cameras that can be mounted on vehicles such as drones or self-driving cars and trucks to give them computer vision that is more wide-ranging, more accurate, and more robust than the plethora of other computer vision systems that Visionary Machines hopes to compete with, Mr Mashkoori said.

Most other camera-based systems need careful calibration before they can accurately judge how far an object is away from the camera, but Visionary Machines’ technology is self-calibrating, he said.

Industrial applications

“If you’re going to point two cameras at something to measure that it’s 100 metres out, and one of those cameras shakes, it’s not going to measure 100 metres any more. So there’s constant calibration required.

Our cameras will survey a scene, self-calibrate, and within a few seconds we’re ready to go,” he said.

Beyond self-driving vehicles, the company was hoping to sell its technology to industries such as mining, agriculture, mapping, virtual reality and surveillance, he said.

Surveillance would be “more related to logistics opportunities … and flow of machines in constrained environments” than to the facial-recognition systems that might be associated with national security applications, he said.

Visionary Machines was founded in 2019 by Dr Rhys Newman and Dr Samson Lee, two researchers who had worked at Canon’s Sydney-based computer vision, image processing and machine learning research centre, CiSRA, which closed that same year.

Autonomous driving

While it will remain headquartered in Sydney, Mr Mashkoori said he will continue to live and work in San Jose, California, which would be used as the company’s “go-to market and globalisation centre”.

“If you drive up and down the peninsula here, every automotive company and every automotive supplier in the world is represented here. If you’re going to do anything [in autonomous driving] you have to be here,” he said.

As part of the round, Folklore Ventures partner Hannah Field will join Visionary Machines’ board. She said the investment was based on a belief that the spatial sensing market was poised for rapid growth, and that Visionary Machines was well positioned to become a global leader.

“From day one, we’ve been blown away by the talent and expertise of the founders and their development of a groundbreaking technology that will advance the reliability and fidelity of 3D ranging,” Ms Field said.