AI video analysis startup Airis Labs raises $60M

Airis Labs Ltd., a provider of video analysis software for government agencies, launched today with $60 million in funding.

The startup raised just over half the capital through a Series A round led by PSG Equity. The growth equity firm was joined by TLV Partners, Stepstone Group, Redseed Ventures and multiple angel investors.

Airis provides a platform that helps public sector organizations such as law enforcement agencies analyze video content. The software can analyze footage from social media, security cameras, drones and other sources. It uses artificial intelligence to combine multiple video fees into a single view of a situation.

One of the challenges involved in processing video datasets is that they often lack an index. An index is a file that developers often add to relational databases to speed up queries. It’s a collection of shortcuts that reduces the amount of time required to find important information. Without an index, users have to go through an entire dataset to find the specific data points they wish to retrieve.

Airis says its platform addresses the challenge. According to the company, the software can speed up some video analysis tasks by a factor of 150. It also removes the need for analysts to use multiple video processing tools.

Customers can configure Airis’ platform to monitor for potential dangers at a specific location. The software displays events of interest in a feed that shows a natural language description of each incident, where it occurred and when.

Users can collect more data about an event using a built-in investigation tool. According to Airis, it provides a drag and drop interface that enables analysts to quickly retrieve specific clips. The underlying AI models can also extract key details from other types of data such as audio snippets and text.

Multimodal models, or neural networks that support multiple data types, are often based on the industry-standard transformer architecture. The architecture was originally designed for text analysis, but it can also ingest other files with the help of certain modifications.

AI models turn text snippets into mathematical representations called embeddings before processing them. Videos and audio snippets can also be turned into embeddings. As a result, transformers can process such files with the help of an algorithm that turns multimedia data into number sequences.

“Government teams do not have a shortage of raw visual data. They have a shortage of machine-readable understanding,” said Airis co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Noam Friedman. “The next generation of AI used by government agencies needs to understand the physical world: what happened, where it happened, what changed, what matters and what requires human judgment.”

Airis will invest its newly raised funding in product development and go-to-market initiatives.

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