Parallel Domain Raises $30 Million Series B to super-train AI

The company reimagining how AI learns, realizing an autonomous future for everyone and everything

We envision a future with accident-free streets, safer skies, smarter homes, and untethered mobility for everyone. When we started Parallel Domain in 2017, we saw that AI models were starved of the data they need to make this future a reality. Five years later, we are delighted that our synthetic data is driving real-world impact for perception teams worldwide. From building smarter autonomous vehicles to helping drones deliver packages into your yard and augmenting human vision with smartphones – our growing set of customers, including Google, Continental, Woven Planet, Toyota Research Institute, and many more, are finding synthetic data critical for scaling the AI that powers their vision and perception systems. 

We are excited to share that Parallel Domain has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by March Capital, with participation from return investors Costanoa Ventures, Foundry Group, Calibrate Ventures, and Ubiquity Ventures. March brings deep experience scaling growth-stage companies across enterprise AI and we’re excited to have March Partner Julia Klein join Parallel Domain’s board of directors.

Today, artificial intelligence is stuck making incremental improvements. The difficulty of obtaining the right data means that underfed AI systems are struggling to learn at the speed our future demands. This has slowed the development of AI-enabled systems including autonomous vehicles, driver assistance systems, robotics, and autonomous drones. The standard method of collecting and manually labeling data from the real world is prohibitively slow and costly, with developers often waiting weeks or months to obtain new data for improving their models. Even then, human labeling errors, performance issues that result from class imbalance, and restrictions around privacy further hinder ML developers in getting their systems to market.

Our solution is the Parallel Domain data generation platform. We enable AI developers to generate synthetic data for training and testing perception models at a scale, speed, and level of control that is impossible with data collected from the real world. The wide range of data that our users generate in our virtual worlds prepares their models for the unpredictability and variety of the physical world. 

Our significant business momentum is a testament to the growing recognition of the value of synthetic data:

• We’ve grown revenue 2.5x year-over-year, expanded our customer base into the double digits, and have multiple customers with seven figure annual subscriptions.
• Customers use our platform to accelerate their ML development cycle more than 180x.
• Our team has grown to over 80 employees across multiple countries to support our customers in North America, Europe, and Asia.
• There’s no other platform for outdoor autonomous systems (vehicles, robots, and drones) today that can generate data at the scale and quality of Parallel Domain.

And this is just the beginning. Gartner predicts that by 2024, 60% of the data used for the development of AI and analytics projects will be synthetic. We are eager to empower every perception team with such capability, enabling a safer and more equitable AI.

“Synthetic data will play a critical role in the future of machine learning. Parallel Domain has emerged as a leader in synthetic data for computer vision, providing tremendous value to the largest players in the fields of mobility, autonomous vehicles, and mobile vision,” said Julia Klein, Partner at March Capital. “We look forward to working closely with Parallel Domain as they build the elastic compute cloud for data.” 

This new funding will enable us to continue driving revenue growth, expand our team and products to service a broader customer base, and capitalize on the latest advancements in generative AI. We are doubling-down on our mission: to accelerate machine learning development with synthetic data.

We can’t wait to see how the world will use synthetic data to drive autonomy and AI development more broadly. If you are a perception team that is ready to break free from the constraints of real-world data – let’s have a conversation

We’re building a team of specialists in machine learning, graphics, simulation and software development. We are a diverse and humble group of talented humans working at the forefront of AI and synthetic data. If you are excited about building safer, smarter, and more equitable AI – join the adventure now!