Unitary AI

Unitary AI is a UK AI startup providing a contextual platform for understanding and moderating online content. The company is developing tools that aim to make the internet safer by applying computer vision models to understand online content and automate content moderation, processing large amounts of video, audio, and text to flag harmful content. Unitary's multimodal AI interprets the context of online content to understand the intent and assess whether it requires moderation.

The company claims its models can process over 25,000 frames of video a second with human-level "common-sense" classifications, reducing the reliance on expensive manual moderation. Unitary's models can be tailored to the customer's policies and content types, provide real-time analysis, and comply with industry standards such as the GARM Brand Suitability Framework. While English is the platform's primary language, it also offers capabilities in a number of other languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Turkish, and Russian.

Unitary's prices are based on the volume of content evaluated. The company also offers Detoxify, an open-source Python library designed to identify comments containing toxic language. Detoxify functions in six languages and is able to incorporate bias into its analysis. Unitary is an API-first product. Users upload content via the company's API, receiving responses and information on GARM, Detoxify, and items and characteristics products through various API endpoints.

Founded in 2019, the company is UK-based and has a remote workforce from around the world. Unitary was founded by Sasha Haco (CEO) and James Thewlis (CTO) and has raised over $24 million in funding.

Before founding Unitary AI, Sasha Haco completed a PhD in theoretical physics (focusing on black holes), a master's degree in natural sciences, and a bachelor of arts degree in natural sciences at the University of Cambridge. During her PhD, Havo worked with Stephen Hawking and spent a year as a visiting fellow at Harvard. Haco also cofounded a software company called Ditto Software. Before founding Unitary AI, James Thewlis completed a Doctor of Philosophy in Autonomous, Intelligent Machines and Systems (AIMS) at the University of Oxford, and a master of engineering degree in computing at the Imperial College London, where he completed a project titled "Face Detection in the Browser with WebGL." He also worked as a machine learning and computer vision specialist and consultant for Mirriad and was a research assistant for both the University of Oxford and Facebook.

Unitary cofounders Haco and Thewlis met at Entrepreneur First (a talent investor that helps people meet their cofounders). They realized they both had a desire to solve challenging real-world problems and an interest in online safety. After seeing that platforms didn't have the tools needed to make users safe online, they decided to start Unitary. The company was founded to help brands and platforms understand every piece of content in detail by building context-aware AI and multimodal machine learning methods.

The company was incorporated on June 11, 2019, and launched a trial of its technology in September 2019. In March 2020, Unitary announced £1.35 million ($1.7 million) in seed funding while the company was still in development mode. The round was led by Rocket Internet’s GFC with participation from Jane VC, SGH Capital, and a number of unnamed angel investors. The company previously raised pre-seed funding from Entrepreneur First, as an alumnus of the company builder program.

Founded just before the outbreak of COVID-19, Unitary established itself as a remote-first company and began hiring computer vision, machine learning, software, and platform engineers from around the globe. In November 2020, the company released the model weights for its open-source moderation tool Detoxify.

In March 2023, Unitarey announced $8 million in additional seed funding led by Ian Hogarth at Plural, and angels investors that include Matt Robinson (founder of GoCardless), Chris Mairs (former CTO of Metaswitch Networks), and Carolyn Everson. Unitary stated the funding will support the company's team growth, the development of its technology, accelerate partnerships, refine Detoxify, and further establish its presence in the US. As of March 2023, Detoxify had been downloaded over seven million times.

On October 3, 2023, Unitary announced a $15 million series A round led by Creandum with participation from Paladin Capital Group and Plural. The investment comes as Unitary launched across multiple languages. At the time of the investment, the company stated its annual recurring revenue (ARR) was in the millions.