A UK startup which uses artificial intelligence to moderate online content has raised $5m (£3.95m) in seed funding.
Checkstep’s latest investment comes less than a year after they closed a $1.8m pre-see round.
The latest round was co-led by Dawn Capital, Europe’s largest B2B technology investor, and Form Ventures, a newly created fund focused on regulatory changes, with participation from founders of GoCardLess, Indeed and Redbus Media Group.
Checkstep’s technology empowers human moderators to create safe online spaces, providing them with better support, tools, and more intelligent AI to tackle harmful content.
Guillaume Bouchard, CEO of Checkstep, said “The problem has been exacerbated by the pandemic when in-person interactions became mostly online.
“Today, every major world event is a new moderation issue: the storming of the Capitol, the responses to the George Floyd killing, the racist comments following the EuroCup, the war in Ukraine, etc. Despite a total addressable market of over $3bn, existing technology is insufficient to support the needs.”
Checkstep is setting the standard for the future of AI content moderation by developing state-of-the-art machine learning models and integrating third-party best-in-class solutions to suit clients’ needs.
The latest investment will be used to further develop Checkstep’s technology, expanding its capabilities so it can continue to provide a one-stop-shop for addressing a platform’s trust and safety needs.
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It will also fund sales and marketing to support the company’s brand awareness, increasing its efforts to drive sales and the next stage of growth.
Checkstep was founded in May 2020 by CEO Guillaume Bouchard and CTO Jonathan Manfield to tackle propagation of misinformation at the height of the Covid pandemic.
The company has since expanded its focus to meet the other needs of its customers, covering a wider range of harms such as hate speech, Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), bullying and spam.
Checkstep recently hired Yu-Lan Scholliers as their new head of product and operations and Vincent Maurin as head of engineering.