Working with both streaming and offline footage, the VisualCortex platform applies machine learning models to video content, enabling organisations to produce data streams about defined objects and actions.

It can be deployed in multiple ways to meet individual organisation’s needs: as a fully-managed service in the cloud, on customers’ private cloud, via public cloud providers, on-premise, at the edge, or via a hybrid deployment model.

Insights from that data can then be embedded straight into customers’ traditional data infrastructure.

VisualCortex is backed by chairman and co-founder Tony Nicol who sold Australia’s largest data-focused cloud consultancy, Servian, to US-based professional services company, Cognizant, in January 2021.

Nicol founded Servian in 2008, where he remained CEO of the 900-person-strong enterprise transformation business until June 2021.

Nicol says that VisualCortex’s purpose was to enable any complex computer vision use case without compromising robustness and reliability.

“We built VisualCortex to overcome the limitations of single-use-case solutions, without sacrificing the stability, security, scalability, flexibility and governance that naturally occurs in homegrown point solutions,” said Nicol.

Nicol said the company’s mission was to enable any organisation to become a vision-aware enterprise, allowing them to solve commercially valuable challenges with video-based insights at scale.

“Up until now, computer vision technology has struggled to make commercial sense and generate impactful business value. They’ve also been prohibitively hard-to-use and expensive in terms of cost and time-to-value, hampering the ability to be harnessed by anyone other than machine learning experts.

“VisualCortex’s Video Intelligence Platform removes those barriers and provides an enterprise-grade approach and control to computer vision initiatives,” said Nicol. “We’re enabling any business unit to quickly and easily build and implement a video analytics use case to facilitate future ways of working, today – no matter the nature of your business, hardware or video content.”

CEO and co-founder Patrick Elliott says VisualCortex was enabling organisations – regardless of the industry or business function – to produce video-based data streams about any aspect of their operations.

“Our Video Intelligence Platform provides the AI smarts, governance and stability. Clients just need to bring their standard infrastructure, commodity hardware and video – from any stream, camera or repository.

Elliott adds that VisualCortex had already signed a number of commercial agreements and that specific partner and customer announcements would be made in the near future.

VisualCortex CTO and co-Founder, Ben Evans, said the company facilitated both real-time action and strategic analysis for any video analytics use case.

“Customers can use analytical insights operationally, triggering real-time alerts – and pushing the video-based data into operational systems – to prompt immediate action. Users can also analyse the data derived from their video assets with in-platform reports or pipe it into third-party databases. Combining video data streams with traditional data sources can unearth powerful integrated insights.”

Evans added that the VisualCortex Model Store would also play a significant role in helping more organisations realise faster, stronger returns on their video analytics initiatives.

“The VisualCortex Model Store provides a secure digital marketplace for customers, partners and independent machine learning experts to share – and generate revenue from – quality controlled computer vision models,” says Evans.