When we founded Kognic four years ago, we had a clear mission: to make safe perception for autonomous vehicles possible through superior data quality. Today, we're proud that many of the world's leading OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, sensor manufacturers, and autonomous vehicle developers rely on our category-leading platform when building their perception systems.
We're thrilled to announce that we've secured $24 million in Series A funding co-led by Metaplanet (an early investor in DeepMind, later acquired by Google) and NordicNinja (the largest Japanese deep tech fund in Europe). Our existing investors Stena Sessan AB and Ernström & Co also made significant contributions to this round, bringing our total capital raised to over $31M.
This investment will fuel our ongoing commitment to excellence. Our core focus remains providing AD and ADAS developers with the industry's most productive platform for training, testing, measuring, and validating the safety of their perception systems. We often describe it as providing "a vision test for cars getting their driver's license." To continuously enhance our solution, we're investing heavily in R&D with our world-class team of engineers and perception experts, ensuring our customers get the most annotated data for their budget.
Supporting our customers means bringing together exceptional talent. Our team has grown substantially over the past year, and we're on track to reach 100 talented employees by the end of 2022. By maintaining our commitment to hiring the best and working closely with customers to help them achieve their development goals, we position ourselves as the most valuable partner in perception safety.
What truly sets Kognic apart is our obsession with quantifying perception data quality. Our company was born from frustration with unreliable and subjective data. While it's widely acknowledged that machine learning systems are only as good as their training data, few organizations actually measure how good their data is. Many simply treat datasets as "the truth." At Kognic, while we deliver data that's consistently accurate and detailed, we recognize that all data carries a probability of being incorrect.
Understanding the trustworthiness of your data is essential for building safe autonomous systems. For autonomous vehicles, this means knowing your confidence level about the environment surrounding the vehicle. Our platform makes this critical knowledge accessible and actionable.
We're expanding our product portfolio to address more aspects of perception data quality. This includes solutions that ensure your datasets contain the right elements and that you're measuring the right perception performance KPIs. Together, these offerings will accelerate your engineering velocity and reduce costs for global data coverage, while maintaining the highest safety standards for your perception system.
We extend our deepest gratitude to our customers, investors, and partners for their continued trust. The complex technical challenges of autonomy can only be solved through collaboration with the industry's brightest minds. We're honored to work alongside such talented customers, partners, and colleagues as we create a future with safe autonomous vehicles.
And we're growing! We're currently hiring for a range of exciting roles. Come join our mission!