AI Convergent Acquisition Datasaur, Wants to Be a Data Labeling Platform Leader

Data labeling platform developer Datasaur announced its acquisition of Convergen AI, a startup developing optical character recognition (OCR) technology.

Through this acquisition, both Datasaur and Convergent AI will integrate and expand their capabilities in the realm of OCR and data labeling. Both Datasaur and Convergent AI are both GDP Venture startup portfolios.

Based on information from its official blog, Datasaur said it has established a close partnership with Convergent AI since working on various joint projects in the last few years.

Datasaur said that it had integrated Convergen AI’s technology, especially its main capabilities in handwriting recognition, government ID field extraction, and intelligent document processing.

The founder and CEO of Datasaur revealed that he has known the Convergent AI Founders, Lintang Sutawika, and Timothy Devin since the birth of Datasaur.

“We are building an ever closer relationship and share a common vision for the future of the AI ​​industry. They have built a strong and close-knit team based on our values. I can’t imagine a better way to grow our team and accelerate our growth.” said Founder & CEO of Datasaur Ivan Lee.

Since November 2021, Datasaur said it has begun to expand the scope of development from text annotations to transcription and audio annotations.

It considers audio as a field ‘adjacent to text’. This way, any user who uploads and transcribes audio can perform the same NLP labeling we have developed in the first place.

In the same way, Datasaur will extend its capabilities to the OCR field, support for image formats and PDFs containing text.

As is known, the data labeling process is one of the important aspects in developing AI-based services, especially in natural language processing (NLP) based modeling.

“We’ve seen how users upload documents, apply OCR to capture relevant text, then annotate the results. By acquiring Convergent AI, we want to strengthen our position as a leader in NLP labeling solutions in the industry,” he added.

Company Focus

Meanwhile, Konvergen.ai Co-founder Lintang Sutawika said he would assume the position of VP of Artificial Intelligence through this acquisition.

“Our focus is on utilizing ML research, such as zero-shot/few-shot and weak supervision to improve the labeling process,” said Lintang as quoted from his LinkedIn page.

For information, Datasaur is a technology developer startup that helps data labelers work more productively and efficiently.

Datasaur handles all NLP models, including entity recognition, document labeling, to dependency parsing. Datasaur was founded by Ivan Lee.

Convergent AI focuses on developing AI technology for data capture needs, which refers to the process of collecting data from paper or digital documents using OCR components.

Convergent AI was founded by Lintang Sutawika and Timothy Devin. Meanwhile, both of them are portfolios of GDP Ventures.

AI Market Trends

Referring to Verified Market Research research, the global AI market in 2020 is estimated to be around $51.08 billion and is projected to skyrocket to $641.3 billion in 2028, with an estimated CAGR growth of 36.1% over the period 2021-2028.

This market value includes the technology-based AI market (NLP, ML, Deep Learning), component analysis (hardware, software & services), and user categories (healthcare, manufacturing, agriculture). Meanwhile, this projection is also triggered by the increasing need for analysis and interpretation of large amounts of data.

In Indonesia, AI is simply implemented for the use of virtual assistants and chatbots in a service. There are also few AI developer startups in Indonesia, some of which are Kata.ai and Bahasa.ai in the NLP realm, and Nodeflux in the computer vision realm.

However, the AI ​​market, especially in the field of NLP, in the country is estimated to increase in line with the trend of healthtech, fintech, and quick commerce services during the Covid-19 pandemic.