AI startup Danti raised a $5M funding round to grow the engineering and go-to-market teams for its AI-powered search engine that can sift through large amounts of data, including satellite imagery, CEO Jesse Kallman told Payload.
Shield Capital led the round, which also included participation from existing investors Tech Square Ventures, Humba Ventures, Space.VC, and Radius Capital.
Danti 101: The company emerged from stealth last year with a $2.75M pre-seed round. Its search engine is intended to quickly comb through images and data from satellites alongside photos taken from drones or aircraft.
Combined with news reports and social media posts, the search tool is designed to quickly give users a full snapshot of everything from defense and intelligence missions to international incidents and natural disasters.
Customers: The company received a direct to phase II SBIR contract from AFWERX, and the search platform is now being used by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and the US Space Force, including the service’s Tactical Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Tracking (TacSRT) program, Kallman said.
“There’s only going to be so many analysts. A lot of US foreign adversaries, they can throw lots and lots of people at this data overload problem,” he said. “We want to make sure that the US can take one analyst and give them the power to be as powerful as 10, 15, 50 analysts…We want to enable the humans to focus on the stuff that actually really matters, not sifting through massive piles of data.”
What’s next: The existing tool is designed to work at an unclassified level, sorting through commercial and public information, but Kallman said a classified version of the search platform is already in the works. He also said Danti is preparing to launch in the commercial market after lots of focus on US government customers, and will go public with its commercial product “in the next couple quarters.”
