Artificial Intelligence technology startup Synthetaic on Tuesday said it has formed a strategic partnership with Microsoft [MSFT] that will allow the small company to apply its AI image processing tool against more than 100 years of cloud computing data to further advance the technology for computer vision and data analysis that could benefit defense, intelligence, commercial and other customers.
Synthetaic will apply its Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) tool to Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform, allowing the AI technology to search nearly 114 years of datasets without pretraining the algorithm. Synthetaic, which is based in Wisconsin, said that said that as part of the integration with Azure’s space platform, it will apply RAIC to geospatial, static, and video imagery for a broad range of use cases.
Microsoft Azure Space serves the space community.
RAIC was used with Earth observation imagery to trace Chinese balloon flights that caused a stir when these balloons entered U.S. airspace.
“Using AI to extract insights from image data is like building a fire, you need heat (AI algorithms), fuel (data), and oxygen (compute),” Corey Jaskolski, founder and CEO of Synthetaic, said in a statement. “This partnership allows us to combine Azure’s GPU (graphics processing units) compute and fast data storage running next to our algorithms, which enables our customers to process massive quantities of visual data into actionable insights and models in minutes.”
Synthetaic also said that having RAIC available on the Azure Government Cloud service will allow U.S. government agencies to leverage the AI tool “while meeting the high security and compliance standards necessary for sensitive government data.”
The partnership between the companies lasts five years.
In March 2022, Booz Allen Hamilton [BAH] disclosed that it had made a strategic investment in Synthetaic, which planned to use the funding to scale RAIC and to continue to establish strategic partnerships to analyze some of the world’s largest datasets (Defense Daily, March 23, 2022).