A New Zealand spatial AI start-up founded by three young university graduates, has raised $1.25 million (NZ$1.5m) in seed capital.

Founded by Ashin Alex, Sam Kurian and Jimin Seo, Hyades describes itself as a “Spatial AI research lab building end-to-end intelligence for spatial data and ML development”.

The funding round saw around $917,000 (NZ$1.1m) raised from high-profile New Zealand investors Tim Brown, Sir Stephen Tindall, Tony Falkenstein and Icehouse Ventures, as well as $334,000 (NZ$400,000) from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment under the New to R&D scheme.

“It’s rare to come across a founding team where every founder is exceptional in their own right,” said Bex Gidall, Principal at Icehouse Ventures.

“What’s even rarer is finding one where they’re stronger together than they are individually. Ash, Sam and Jimin stood out to us for exactly that reason.”

The seed funding will be used to attract enterprise co-design collaborators, AI specialist talent (it has current vacancies), and for scaling Hyades’ software platform for wider release.

The business is building AI- and ML-based technology to use spatial data for the benefit of sectors such as agriculture, climate change, defence and mining.

“Our platform www.blazerops.ai is live today: underwriters, analysts and scientists can engineer complex geospatial AI models to drive strategic decisions, in a fraction of the time,” the company says.

According to Hyades, BlazerOps has already helped an agricultural organisation “replicate a published hybrid retrieval workflow for crop trait mapping in 1 day — compared to an estimated month of manual MATLAB development”.