Dashmote Keeps Growing: Secured Funding for $2.8 Million
It all started in a garage, from the imagination of three young entrepreneurs. They wanted to use artificial intelligence to allow people to understand the world they live in.
Now, five years and hundreds of thousands of code lines later, their creature, Dashmote, secured $2.8 million from a pool of American and Chinese investors. Our game steps up to the next level.
The early years of Dashmote
In its early days, Dashmote was, as it often happens with enterprises that move in rapidly changing high-tech environments, not what it is today. “Initially — Stefan Tan, Dashmote’s CFO explains — we were a stock image aggregator.” And this made sense back then, because, he continues “training algorithms running unstructured data requires a lot of practice.”
Our goal was clear from the beginning, though. Unlocking the real power of AI, for all. Working with companies, innovators, visionaries, providing them with a tool to understand the data that is generated every day in the online world. A tool that they could use to give people a better experience, a better service — a better life, if one wants to think big.
Growing fast in the artificial intelligence world
Every day, 3 billion images are uploaded on the web. Such data can “talk” to us, if we ask the right AI-powered questions. Data can tell us many, many things, showing us the direction we should head toward.
Over the few years that separate us from that moment when Stefan, Dennis, Matthaus and, later, Adrian, created Dashmote, a number of big international players understood this and started working with us.
Coca Cola, Heineken, Unilever, L’Oreal, are some of them. They want to provide a better service to their customers and, to do so, they need to know them well, understand what they want and surprise them every day.
Large companies that operate in consumer electronics, food and beverage, and cosmetics use our solutions to sharpen their marketing efforts and up-sell capabilities. Data analysis is used to discover market trends, operate an effective segmentation of the offer, and measure the audience sentiment and engagement.
In less than 4 years our team grew from less than ten to more than forty dedicated and enthusiastic professionals, coming from everywhere in the world and distributed into our three main offices — Amsterdam, Shanghai and New York. This number is going to double by the end of 2019. We will be almost a hundred, and openings of new offices in the U.S. and Asia are foreseen for the near future.
The funding
The funding we received comes from a group of American and Chinese investors. It includes entrepreneurs from SP Investment Associates (SPIA), Three Curve Capital (TCC) and Gaomei Yunjing Investments.
“We are very pleased with the international group of investors. They are a great fit to our ambition to solidify our position in existing markets and to roll out to new markets,” Dennis Tan, our CEO explains.
We will benefit from the international experience of SPI and Three Curve Capital. It’s not only about the money they brought to the table: they will allow us to get stronger and grow our network even more.
As for Gaomei, Chines VC, this is the first investment outside their home country and we believe this must mean something. In Ning Gu’s — founder and general partner at Gaomei — words: “Dennis and Stefan have proven even before we came along that they had a clear vision on how to enter Asian markets. They have done so successfully with their own strategy of local culture and approach with an international push.”
What lies ahead for Dashmote
We will use this fresh capital to expand our product portfolio. Dashmote’s AI technology is now predominantly serving image analytics for trend, brand, and location intelligence services.
Moreover, in the near future, we will unlock information coming from online video material — another potentially inexhaustible source of insights for companies. Together with a new way to visualize the gathered information, this will offer companies even more possibilities to understand data and leverage it for marketing, strategy and sales purposes.
Great things are at the horizon for us. This is just the beginning of a wonderful journey.
About Dashmote
Dashmote is an AI technology scale-up headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. With the goal of bridging the gap between images and data, we are working to bring AI-based solutions to marketers for clients like Heineken, Unilever, Philips, L’Oreal, and Coca-Cola. We add value in areas such as Location Analysis, Trends Analysis, and Marketing Intelligence. Doing so on a global level, our company today has offices in Amsterdam, Shanghai, Vienna, and New York.
Are you interested in our AI-powered solutions? Get in touch with us, we will tell you everything you want to know about them!
