The KTH spinoff in the midst of Silicon Valley's AI rush
Meet SuperAnnotate
SuperAnnotate, an alumni company from KTH Innovation Launch is one of Silicon Valley’s fastest growing AI startups, finishing 2024 with raising 36 million dollars. We checked in with founder Vahan Petrosyan.
SuperAnnotate’s journey began at KTH, where Vahan Petrosyan was pursuing a PhD with a focus on image segmentation. Based on his research, he began developing a tool together with Tigran Petrosyan, a graduate of ETH Zurich, and KTH student Oscar Örnberg to automate the process of image annotation. Annotated images are needed to train AI models, and the process involves labeling or tagging objects, people, or areas in an image to help computers understand the content. At the time, this was often a manual and time-consuming task.
From KTH Innovation Launch to Silicon Valley
Vahan got in touch with KTH Innovation in 2017. Soon thereafter, the team joined KTH Innovation Launch, a program for promising startup teams from KTH.
“Our initial idea was to apply the technology to image editing applications, but together with our coach and support from the program, we got help to iterate on our ideas so we could find something that was impactful and possible to commercialize”, says Vahan.
In the program, Vahan and his co-founders took part in workshops in business development, expanded their network, and grew together with the other teams in their batch. In October 2019, they graduated from KTH Innovation Launch, and shortly thereafter SuperAnnotate was admitted to the prestigious Berkeley Skydeck accelerator program. Vahan relocated to Silicon Valley to continue building the company.
Secured 36 million dollars in investment
Today, SuperAnnotate has grown far beyond the original image segmentation algorithm into one of the leading AI data infrastructure companies in the world. In late 2024, they closed a $36M Series B round, securing investment from among others Databricks Ventures.
“SuperAnnotate has become a leading platform for building, managing and fine tuning training data for a wide range of AI applications, says Vahan.”
Databricks, a leading data and analytics company, was founded by Ali Ghodsi, who was previously Assistant Professor at KTH. Today, Databricks is one of SuperAnnotate’s largest customers.
Strong connection to Sweden
Although based in Silicon Valley, SuperAnnotate’s connection to Sweden and KTH remains strong.
“Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how helpful KTH Innovation was going to be when I first joined the program. From refining the business model to patenting my algorithm to the initial investment from KTH Holding, KTH provided the support and guidance I needed to help make SuperAnnotate a reality. KTH Innovation gave so much confidence that starting a complex infrastructure company was no brainer!”
Text: Lisa Bäckman