On November 24, 2020, Hasty, a start-up building a next-generation computer vision AI annotation tool, announced it has raised $3.7 million in a seed round led by Shasta Ventures, a notable Silicon Valley venture capital firm with a number of high-profile exits to its name, including Anaplan (IPO), Glint (acquired by LinkedIn), Appsheet (acquired by Google), and Zuora (IPO). Other participants in the round include iRobot Ventures and Coparion. Wilson Sonsini represented Shasta Ventures in the transaction.

The global computer vision market was pegged at $11.4 billion in 2020, a figure that is projected to rise to more than $19 billion by 2027. Data preparation and processing is one of the most time-consuming tasks in AI, accounting for around 80 percent of time spent on related projects. In computer vision, annotation, or labeling, is a technique used to mark and categorize images to give machines the meaning and context behind the picture, enabling them to spot similar objects. Much of this annotation work falls to humans. The problem Hasty is looking to fix is that the vast majority of data science projects never make it into production, with significant resources wasted in the process.

For more information, please see VentureBeat's coverage of the fundraise.