• Unitary’s AI processes millions of videos and images every day, assessing risk and harm in user-generated content uploaded to the world’s largest social networks 
• Social networks and ad tech companies rely on its context-aware AI to prevent harmful content from being published as the scale of material swamps human moderators 
• Unitary’s popular open-source tool Detoxify detects written toxicity and has been downloaded over 2 million times.

London, 7th February 2023: Unitary, the startup building contextual AI to automate content moderation, is announcing today it has raised $8 million in funding led by Ian Hogarth at Plural and strategic angels, including technology marketing leader Carolyn Everson who is joining the  board. The funding will be used to grow the team developing its AI technology, accelerate partnerships and continue its open-source work to keep everyone safe online.

With an estimated 4 billion social media users worldwide uploading more than 80 years’ worth of new footage to different platforms from Instagram to Tiktok, Reddit to YouTube every single day, the content moderation challenge continues to grow, with a market expected to reach $32 billion by 2031. 

Unitary was founded in 2019 by Sasha Haco and James Thewlis. Haco, a mathematician who worked with Steven Hawking on the black hole information paradox during her PhD at Cambridge, and Thewlis, a computer vision specialist who previously worked with Facebook AI Research, met at Entrepreneur First’s accelerator programme. Together they decided to use their respective expertise to build a solution to protect communities from online harm. Since its inception, the company has grown a remote team across five countries working in partnership with social networks, ad tech companies and media businesses to enable them to highlight video content that could be unsafe for particular users, platforms or advertisers. 

Critically, the AI can ‘read’ the context of user-generated videos. For example, it can distinguish between a video that glorifies hate speech and documentary footage that aims to raise awareness about hateful content, without a human reviewer needing to be involved. Unitary’s technology dynamically scales up and down according to demand, reaching scales of 25,000 video frames processed in a single second.

The new funding round will enable Unitary to continue to develop its technology and support its open-source work, whilst the addition of Everson to the board will be extremely valuable to the company as it scales up to reach platforms and protect advertisers and users around the world. Everson, former VP of Global Marketing Solutions at Meta, has spent her career building high-performance teams in the digital media ecosystem at companies including Microsoft and Viacom and also sits on the corporate boards of The Walt Disney Company, The Coca-Cola Company and Under Armour.

Sasha Haco, co-founder and CEO at Unitary, said:

“The scale and speed at which harmful content can spread across social networks and the internet is only growing. Online platforms can’t handle the complexity of moderating these billions of daily images, videos and other posts, whilst human moderation has proven to be ineffective at dealing with the volume of content as well as being largely harmful to those involved. At Unitary, we’re committed to making the internet a safer place for everyone and with the support of investors like Plural, who understand the complexity of developing and scaling deep tech, we can see a clear route to making an impact on this snowballing problem that affects us all.”

Ian Hogarth, founding partner at Plural and co-author of The State of AI, said:

“Sasha and James have chosen to tackle one of modern society’s hardest problems and we are in awe of their intellect and determination. Plural was founded to help startups like this apply cutting-edge machine learning to a critical global challenge. As more and more cameras are connected to the internet, we will need ever more intelligent tools to organize that content and make it harder for bad actors to operate.”

Carolyn Everson, angel investor and Unitary board member, said:

“From my time working at Meta, I understand deeply the problem that Sasha and James are trying to solve at Unitary. We will all benefit from their mission to make the internet a safer, more enjoyable place to be and I look forward to working closely with the team to make this a reality.”

ENDS

Contact:

About Unitary:

Founded in 2019 by Sasha Haco and James Thewlis, Unitary is developing computer vision models to understand online content and make the internet safer. Its technology is used by leading social networks and ad tech businesses so they can understand every piece of content in detail and with context. https://www.unitary.ai/ 

About Plural: 

Set up by founders for founders, Plural is a €250m investment platform which is investing early stage venture capital in exceptional European tech companies. Its investors with scar tissue support founders to build tech companies that can make a GDP impact. https://pluralplatform.com