Datature, a Singapore player in the machine learning sector, said Wednesday it has raised $2.7 million from Openspace, a regional tech investor.

January Capital also participated in the round, Datature said in a statement.

The latest funding will enable Datature to expand its platform offering in order to support more widespread use cases including video analytics, medical and point-cloud data ingestions, and a neural network cloud API for users to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities anywhere.

The fundraising follows impressive early traction as Datature quickly establishes itself as one of the most exciting new end-to-end no-code MLOps platforms. Designed from the ground up, Datature’s full suite of solutions provides teams with the ability to annotate, augment, train and deploy computer vision models all without a single line of code.

“We are glad to partner with Openspace to expand our product development, and accelerate our go-to-market motion with support from their operation team. Additionally, we are excited to work with incoming strategic investors to assemble a full-stack, high-coverage ML solution for companies,” said Keechin Goh, Co-Founder of Datature.

Datature is an end-to-end MLOps platform that allows companies and teams to build breakthrough AI capabilities. The platform empowers teams to swiftly create ground truths, perform transfer learning, deploy AI models, and more. It democratizes access to complex deep-learning algorithms by providing a full suite of powerful interfaces. To date, thousands of teams worldwide have leveraged Datature’s platform to collaborate, build and deploy breakthrough AI applications in medical, defense, manufacturing, and retail.

Investors globally are taking note of the growth in the machine learning market, which is projected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 43 percent, achieving $30.6 billion in 2024. As companies recognise the integral role AI and machine learning have in aspects of their business operations, it’s becoming essential that all employees, particularly those with domain expertise but lacking in coding expertise, have access to the tools and solutions provided by machine learning. This emergent skills gap has given rise to the citizen data scientist – employees that have valuable business knowledge but are in need of a way to easily transfer that into the AI world.

It was through observing this issue first-hand in large-scale businesses that led to the founding of Datature in 2020. The team behind it are machine learning engineers who met in 2013 and built the platform on the back of a series of impressive hackathon victories. It is now enabling the next wave of machine learning projects by democratizing access to complex and deep-learning algorithms to empower enterprises to create their own AI breakthroughs at speed – ensuring teams can focus on key initiatives, without the burden of complex coding.

“Today, most authoritative and experienced industry experts do not necessarily possess the technical abilities to architect and deploy machine learning solutions. Datature hopes to support the next wave of citizen data scientists and deep-tech teams with a self-serve, end-to-end platform that enables anyone to orchestrate large-scale ML projects. By easing the operational burden of dealing with cloud operations and providing cutting-edge algorithms behind an intuitive tool – we believe that we can play a part in accelerating ML from research to production to services,” said Goh.

By operating at the intersection of high customizability and easy-to-use, the simple drag-and-drop interface has already been adopted by more than 1000 teams and companies worldwide. Datature has enabled those teams, from a variety of sectors, to collaborate, build and deploy powerful AI solutions to their distinct business challenges within just weeks of engagement.

“We’re excited to be actively working with Keechin and Denzel. They’re two very strong technical co-founders that have bootstrapped their way to an already sophisticated product. They’ve been able to turn complexity into intuitive tools that enable even aspiring data scientists to build very advanced ML models. We are looking forward to helping them accelerate from here”, said Ian Sikora, Executive Director at Openspace.

Javier Ng, Investor at January Capital said that :“When we first met Keechin and Denzel, we were immediately drawn to their ability to articulate a considered vision on how they plan to build an enduring company in the no-code AI space. As we dug deeper, we built increasing conviction in Datature’s platform and approach, which we believe addresses the two key fundamental barriers of AI adoption – skills shortage and the complexity involved in the development process. By empowering non-technical teams to utilize computer vision, Datature accelerates the time to value for mission-critical use cases. We’re thrilled to partner with Datature and be on this journey with them.”

Singapore employment platform Multiplier raises $60M led by Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital India