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Listen to Sasha Haco tell the story of her entrepreneurial journey, from studying for her PhD at Cambridge University to launching a business that is innovating in the application of Artificial Intelligence technologies.
In the Catapult Network’s Supercharging Innovation podcast, knowledge experts and leaders from the Catapult Network talk with some of the UK’s top industrial and academic leaders and parliamentarians to get their views on science, innovation and technology. Together, they are putting UK innovation under the spotlight and exploring the role of Government, businesses, the research community, private investors, and other innovative organisations in strengthening the economy through collaboration. Welcome to the Catapult Network’s Supercharging Innovation Podcast, subscribe now.
The Innovate UK Catapult Network provides a unique combination of cutting-edge R&D facilities and world-class technical expertise to support UK business innovation. Catapults are a critical element of Innovate UK’s portfolio of products and services, where the application of research is accelerated, and where new technologies are further developed, scaled up and realised. The Catapult Network is made up of nine world-leading technology and innovation centres with more than 65 national locations.
Hello, and welcome to the Catapult Network's Supercharging Innovation podcast. My name is Jeremy Silver, chair for this year of the Catapult Network. In this series, I'm talking to some of the UK's top industry and academic leaders, business people, and parliamentarians to get their views on the future of innovation. On today's episode, I'm delighted to welcome Sasha Haco. Sasha is cofounder and CEO of unitree.ai, a content moderation startup that is using artificial intelligence to detect harmful videos on the Internet.
Jeremy Silver:Sasha was listed by BeauHirst as one of the UK's top female entrepreneurs under 30. And prior to founding Unitary, Sasha gained her PhD at Cambridge University, where she had the privilege of working with Stephen Hawking on the mysteries of black holes. Sasha, a very warm welcome to you.
Sasha Haco:Thanks very much. Nice to be here.
Jeremy Silver:Tell us a bit about Unitree. It's a company that aims to make the Internet a safer place, I guess, but what's the background? How did you get started in it?
Sasha Haco:So Unitree was started about two and a half years ago now. So we're still a small start up up and our goal is absolutely to make the Internet safer. So the idea is that we want to have technology that can automatically detect harmful content online, and we're particularly looking at videos. Because at the moment, people post huge amounts of video content on the Internet every day. And at the moment, if something horrible is uploaded, a lot of people have to see it.
Sasha Haco:And then often, the only way it's taken down is if it's sent for manual review. So there's thousands of moderators, manual moderators around the world who are reviewing, taking down content. And we're really trying to automate that process and make sure that people don't have to see it on the platform and the moderators also don't have to see it.
Jeremy Silver:In order to do that, presumably, you have to access vast quantities of those videos yourselves?
Sasha Haco:Exactly. Vast quantities of all sorts of content, videos, images, text as well, and audio. There's all these different components that we need to be able to understand and want to work out what's really going on in that video across the whole spectrum. I mean, data is a massive, massive part of it.
Jeremy Silver:It's an incredibly ambitious project and it's obviously very, very timely given everything that's been going on and and all the concerns and the apparent inability of big social networking platforms to do this for themselves. But tell me a little bit about your background. What what inspired you to start the business?
Sasha Haco:I was sort of coming to the end of my PhD and realized that I wanted to do something maybe in the sort of startup world but I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do and so I was exploring different ideas. And I joined a program based in London called Entrepreneur First, which is a startup generator, I guess. So they take about a 100 people into their program and then try and match you up and you have time to try and find a co founder and come up with an idea for a startup. So I did this program and I met then my brilliant cofounder, James, and his background is in computer vision. And so you basically using AI to understand images and videos.
Sasha Haco:And he'd also spent some time working at Facebook. And so we started talking about the different challenges and issues and came across this problem of of content moderation which is a massive issue. And then the more I started reading about it the more I realized this is an even bigger problem than I had even first imagined and it was just really horrendous what people were posting online. I had no idea about how grim some people are. People post awful things online and then how many people have to see this stuff.
Sasha Haco:The more I learned about it, the more I became really interested in this topic and realized that something needs to be done about it, but also there's a lot that could be done. I mean, even though the big social media companies has a huge problem, so do all the other tiny companies. And the difference is that the big social networks have huge amount of technology themselves, and smaller companies often have nothing. So there's sort of loads to do across the full spectrum, I guess.
Jeremy Silver:I mean, I suppose that the obvious question that one would ask is given the incredible power and expertise that Google for YouTube and Facebook have got, why do you think that your startup could do a better job?
Sasha Haco:I guess there's 2 things I think is really interesting. One is that they definitely have big teams working on it, but a lot of stuff, especially when it comes to video, is progressing really fast even in the world of academia. So things are literally new ideas are being developed all the time and new ways of tackling these problems. So in a year's time everybody today will be behind. And so basically just keeping up with all the latest advances and building on that ourselves gives us an edge, and being able to be a smaller, you know, and dynamic startup that can move quickly is one thing.
Sasha Haco:The other thing I think is really exciting is that each of these platforms can only see what's been posted on their own platform. And I know that sounds obvious, but a big issue is that when somebody posts something grim on one platform, it often gets spread around all the other platforms. And so today, the moderation teams at every single social network have to independently take down often the same video. So if something's posted on TikTok and it's spread to YouTube, Facebook, etcetera, And then each of these, companies will have to use their own moderators to take down that video. And that, first of all, it just doesn't make any sense that it's being exposed to far more people than than necessary.
Sasha Haco:And so I think actually there is a really strong play in that there could be a centralized moderation system where every video is only screened once and then, if it's uploaded once and flagged as harmful it then can be stopped from being uploaded anywhere else.
Jeremy Silver:Really interesting. Well, let's come back to this. But before I go much further, there's a sort of tantalizing detail in your biog about how you worked with Stephen Hawking while you were at university. And I'm sure that everybody wants to know about this and asks you about it, but what was that experience like?
Sasha Haco:It was great. It was really great. So that was during my PhD. I was sort of lucky enough to work with him on one of his biggest problems, I guess, something that he felt really passionately about, which was the black hole information paradox, it's called. Essentially, what happens to something when it falls into a black hole?
Sasha Haco:It appears to be lost forever and this doesn't make sense. It was actually a paradox that he invented himself. It was really important to him that during his lifetime, he was able to resolve it. And so I was lucky enough to be part of a team of people working on that problem. And so for about 4 years, I think, we were working on it and it was really great.
Sasha Haco:He was a very inspiring person. He had amazing intuition and I think probably maybe because of the fact that he couldn't write stuff down and did everything in his head, he was able to make amazing mental leaps that would have taken me, you know, months of scribbling notes or doing calculations. So it was a really exciting and just a really inspiring time.
Jeremy Silver:Wonderful. An incredible experience that you will carry with you through the rest of your career I'm sure. Definitely. Coming back to unitary then and to the way in which, and perhaps drawing on from that experience with Stephen Hawking, the way in which AI is moving, and you said it's moving really a pace. It's very interesting that the question of the sort of thinking about ethics in the context of AI has become more and more prominent and more and more important.
Jeremy Silver:And yet, historically if we've looked back at the way in which technology companies have developed mostly they've not been terribly concerned with questions of ethics. They tended to try and suggest that they were safe harbors or neutral platforms and that those were other people's problems. What's changed?
Sasha Haco:I mean, I think AI ethics is a absolutely huge space. And now it's a so its own, like, research field and problems of AI. Bias are just vast, and I think people are realising the consequences that AI bias can have. And essentially that a model in some senses is only as good as the data you provide it with, or worse. And so if there's subtle biases in the data that you give it, then the model, the output is likely to be very biased and those biases can be magnified.
Sasha Haco:And that's a very scary thing. So if you were to train your model with a disproportionate number of people from 1 gender or or race, then your output of your model will show these, these biases too. And that can have really profound consequences, especially something I feel very nervous about, especially when it comes to moderation and saying when, if something is, you know, harmful or not. You don't want to inadvertently accuse a whole waste of being harmful just because they appear in certain type of content.
Jeremy Silver:You're certainly placing yourself right in the heart of that debate with your business, aren't you?
Sasha Haco:Definitely. It feels very scary. It's something I want I mean, we as a business take really seriously and how can we try and mitigate bias as much as possible and make sure that we're not perpetuating any of society's biases. Basically, we train our data based on online content, and the online content is itself has biases and some that, you know, we don't even know about. So it's something that we need to take really seriously to make sure that we're doing the best we can to mitigate that.
Jeremy Silver:It's very interesting, isn't it? On the one hand we've seen the technology companies have tended to not pursue that with that consciousness in the past. And I wonder whether investors have changed their perspective too. I mean, obviously there's been some massive worldwide events, Cambridge Analytica notwithstanding, that that have changed people's opinions about this and made people realize how centrally important and how challenging these these problems are. As an entrepreneur, you're out there trying to to fundraise and to raise investment in in the business.
Jeremy Silver:Is that a part of the conversation now with your investors?
Sasha Haco:When people ask what what sets us apart, I think it's maybe part of it. Something we take very seriously and people want us to take it very seriously. But I think also it's part of conversation with customers and people want to know that the models you'd be providing them with and the product you provide them with has itself been scrutinized for signs of bias and that sort of thing. So I think generally you're better served if you take this matter seriously than if you ignore it.
Jeremy Silver:But I suppose the question is, is that now becoming one of the criteria that investors are looking for in companies they want to invest in? Or do you think they're still not really up to thinking about that?
Sasha Haco:I think probably on the whole, it's not, a central question. It's definitely getting bigger and probably is, a bit
Jeremy Silver:You think it should be?
Sasha Haco:Oh, I think it should be. I think you can do a lot of a lot of harm when people talk about, you know, impact and social investing and that sort of thing. And the flip side of that is if you don't take these issues seriously, you can do some real damage. And so it should be something that people are thinking about very seriously. But just as with the vast majority of investors are not so concerned about social good.
Sasha Haco:There are lots of that are, but also lots that aren't. And I think it's on the same sort of lines as people take that part of it seriously. So we're lucky to have investors that do but not everyone does.
Jeremy Silver:Well, hopefully, you can choose the ones that are suitable to your business and that's always a great position to be in as an entrepreneur to be able to choose investors rather than to take the money from wherever you can get it. But it's an interesting question for you. I mean, as a startup company and you're still at a very early stage, you've been engaging both with the public and the private sector in terms of support. And in this podcast, we're sort of really interested in the way in which the innovation landscape is supporting businesses and whether it's being effective or not. I mean, when you've gone out and looked at what the opportunities to get support and get investment have been, have you looked equally at public and private sources of support and and what have you found out there?
Sasha Haco:I guess I've looked at everything to see what's available. Both have been really valuable in different ways. I suppose venture investing and private investment is great because it's a big injection of cash, which can give you the oomph that you need to get going. Whereas I found that with public investment, it's about raising grant money as we've done. It's about raising money for specific projects.
Sasha Haco:So rather than just for the business generally and for the general growth, it's about doing specific things. In that context, that's where we've developed projects specifically around taking into account ethics and that sort of thing. And so we have one current research sort of grant funded by Innovate UK around developing better video models that's joined with Oxford University. So that's about can we better understand online content specifically for video.
Jeremy Silver:And do you think that the way in which those grants are offered and the way that they're structured, do you think it takes into account enough the the perspective of private investors? Is there any kind of relationship drawn between the 2, do you think? And should there be more?
Sasha Haco:I think there's some credibility, I suppose. If you have one, it's either to get another, maybe. It shows that you, I guess, know what you're doing a bit, but maybe you've managed to fool everyone. So that and that definitely helps. But, otherwise, I found they are quite quite separate.
Sasha Haco:Certainly, in terms of process, it's totally different. One involves just a pitch and pitching people about why you're gonna make lots of money, I guess, and what the huge vision is. And what I found with, private investors is they want to know you're gonna be a $1,000,000,000 company. Whereas with public money, it's not necessarily about becoming a $1,000,000,000 company, but showing that you can have real financial return and also that you have impact in some way and maybe that social impact or something else.
Jeremy Silver:I mean, do you think that we should be using public funding and grants in that way to incentivize and to provide more confidence to private investors? Do you think we should be more explicit about that? Would would that help you actually as a business?
Sasha Haco:I don't know. It might help me because I've been lucky enough to get government grants. I mean, they are quite different in some ways and it's quite helpful having a distinction, I think. So we've been using our private investor money for the general growth of the business and looking at the grant money as opportunities to grow specific areas we maybe wouldn't otherwise.
Jeremy Silver:Absolutely. And then that's obviously what the intention of the grant money currently is. It's just interesting to hear your thoughts about what the relationship between those two sources of money is and how you can use them alongside one another. I mean, you mentioned that you'd started your company 2 years ago, which would have placed you just before the beginning of the pandemic. How's the how's the pandemic impacted your ability to go out and fundraise?
Sasha Haco:Well, we're actually very lucky in that we closed our funding round just before the pandemic. I think it was in late January of 2019. So that was a really big stroke of luck, and I felt very, relieved because when the pandemic hit in the startup world, generally there was people sort of sending messages around about how the pandemic was really having a devastating impact on their business and fundraising was really, really tough. I felt that investors were really saving their money to help their current portfolio of companies survive the pandemic rather than necessarily spending it. I know that some investors continue to spend as normal but that wasn't a feeling.
Sasha Haco:It felt like it would have been a very, very difficult time to fundraise. And so I felt like we just got incredibly lucky with our timing and that allowed us really to survive and thrive throughout the pandemic.
Jeremy Silver:Well, obviously, it created enormous uncertainty and one thing investors don't like is uncertainties. Inevitably, a hesitation there. Although it does now seem to have come back very strongly. So hopefully, you'll have missed it completely in terms of an impact on you and your next round will be even more successful. Let me ask you, just going back to the sort of the, your sense of the way in which public funding and public support works for you and you've found ways of making it work, taking this up a level, the government's just published an innovation strategy in which it's setting out its plans, for the UK and a vision for the UK to become a global hub for innovation.
Jeremy Silver:Is that something that you even pay very much attention to or is that really quite peripheral to you as a as an early stage startup?
Sasha Haco:It's a bit peripheral. And the reason is just that as an early stage startup, there was so much going on, and we've got to contend with so many different things. We need to survive as a company. We need to develop our product, build our technology, find customers, develop our strategy. And there's just a million things going on that we almost have just such limited bandwidth to do other things.
Sasha Haco:Maybe I shouldn't admit this, but a lot of the opportunities I find is because someone just said to me, you know, here's this opportunity and it's landed and I'm in the right place at the right time rather than me having capacity really to go out and and seek out lots of different things and understand what's out there, which of course I'm trying to do as well, but it's just one of many, many, many things.
Jeremy Silver:If someone said to you, well, well, what would you like to see in a government strategy of that kind? Given your current situation, that there's something that would would be of immediate and immense help to you, what what what would you say?
Sasha Haco:Good question. I'm seeing from where we're sitting, we're seeing a bit of that already actually in that I'm part of the safety tech space as it's called, and so there's been a lot of government, strategy around online safety. That's something I've been very aware of and we've been really in a good spot for that And so there's several public initiatives around bringing together different companies in this space to be able to work together and collaborate. And that's been really helpful and a way to almost find out, you know, what are the other companies out there doing and who are the other people we should chat with? Are there opportunities for collaboration?
Sasha Haco:And I know there's gonna be potential grants around that. So that's all really, really helpful. And there's also been doing a lot of research into what are the key challenges of companies in this sector, and then how can these be helped. So that's been a very, very useful thing. So I think that's actually it's happening in a way.
Jeremy Silver:And that's in terms of developing your your kind of product market fit essentially to understand the needs of potential customers.
Sasha Haco:Exactly. Yeah.
Jeremy Silver:You mentioned the innovate UK grants and the kind of convening power of government. I mean, are there other public sector programs that you've taken advantage of that you've found helpful?
Sasha Haco:Yeah. So I'm also part of the women in innovation grant this year, and that's been brilliant not just from a financial point of view but also it's been a really, great opportunity to meet other female founders. I think there's been about 40 of us this year and there's monthly coffee sessions and we've also had some really great talks and there's been a few days every few months where we kind of get together and there've been speakers and learning about lots of different things and so that's been very helpful just in terms of from a learning point of view rather than purely a financial one. I've got a lot out of that as well.
Jeremy Silver:And obviously being part of the kind of the landscape and having a network that you can move around in is ends up being useful for the business even if you don't necessarily know exactly how or when. Let me ask you something else that you you've talked about your background at Cambridge. You're now building a business. Do you retain your links with the university? Do you see the university as having a role to play as you build the business or have you now moved on from there and now you're just really focused on the company itself?
Sasha Haco:I think the latter, really. I mean, I don't think the university have any direct impact on the business. I mean, I still have links with the university as a, you know, alumni. But other than that, I feel it's very separate, especially as sort of my research is quite different from my research. I was doing was very different from the kind of things we're doing now.
Jeremy Silver:You don't see necessarily that there's value potentially in drawing on more research that's going on in the university and then finding ways of bringing that into the into the business?
Sasha Haco:Oh, for sure. That's something like, for example, with this, collaboration with Oxford, we're doing that a lot. But I think that it could be Cambridge, it would be potentially easier if it was Cambridge because that's where I was, but it could also be, you know, another great university with other research happening. It doesn't necessarily need to be that. I think there's lots of value in having, you know, making use of research output and collaborating, but that doesn't necessarily need to be from where I came from.
Jeremy Silver:Another question about sort of as you build the business, working in AI is super exciting, but it's also super competitive and finding talent and expertise in this space, it must be one of your biggest challenges. Where do you turn to it? Where do you find your talent and your your team?
Sasha Haco:It is really hard. And it's something I actually didn't anticipate. I thought it would be easy to find people, but it's not because there are so many great start ups and lots of great people, but there's lots of choice for them. So far, we've mainly found people through our network. Either that's, my cofounder or I going out to people we know or friends of friends or recommendations from investors, but it's all been really through through network.
Sasha Haco:I mean, it's just very tough to sort of make our company stand out from all the thousands of other start ups looking to hire in this in this space.
Jeremy Silver:And how many are you now at the moment?
Sasha Haco:We're now 6.
Jeremy Silver:6 of you at the moment. What's your target for the next year?
Sasha Haco:I think we're hoping to grow significantly in the next year and probably at least double. A lot of that depends on company business outcomes and if we can close deals and that sort of thing.
Jeremy Silver:But if there are people out there, they should definitely apply. I think is what you I might be saying that on your behalf.
Sasha Haco:Thank you very much. I that's exactly what I should have said. Yeah. If you're if you're listening, please apply.
Jeremy Silver:Always gotta be recruiting.
Sasha Haco:Exactly.
Jeremy Silver:Let me ask you something else about your role as a female founder. Obviously, this has become more and more important to all of us as we recognize the immense kind of value of making sure that we include 100% of the population, not 50% of the population in developing businesses and developing talent. And you mentioned the Women in Innovation Network and the award that you had from Innovate UK. What do you think we need to do? How well are we actually doing in terms of making opportunities more accessible for women?
Jeremy Silver:Are we there yet, or have we still got a long way to go?
Sasha Haco:We're definitely not there yet. There's loads to do. And speaking with other female founders, I know that people have had very mixed experiences with things like raising money and things. I've personally been quite lucky, but, you know, I feel like I've been lucky rather than the norm. And I think there there was just a long way to go.
Sasha Haco:The Women in Innovation Award has been fantastic and it's allowed me to meet lots of other female founders because otherwise most of the founder community that I know are largely male just because that's currently, most founders are male. But It's just been a really nice opportunity to meet other people and share experiences, you know, not just about being a female founder, but just about being a founder generally, and that's been really helpful to understand different perspectives. The most important thing for me has been to to have a network of people to talk to and have a diverse group of people, and that's what the women innovation award has been really helpful for. And so fostering those sort of communities, I think, is is really important.
Jeremy Silver:So have you got any words of advice and and wisdom for for other women innovators who are looking to grow business or develop ideas?
Sasha Haco:Oh, I don't know. If I should be giving advice, we're still I can't say we've succeeded yet. I guess my advice would be just to go for it. There's no reason not to. And if you have a great idea or have any idea that you really want to pursue, then why not try?
Jeremy Silver:Excellent advice. Yes.
Sasha Haco:And let me ask
Jeremy Silver:you just one other thing. Increasingly, I think we're all looking to not just to include women, but to include the increase the diversity and include different ways of thinking and different kinds of representatives from different ethnic minorities and different newly diverse people. What's your attitude to to that in terms of building your own business? I'm sure it's something that you're positively thinking about, but when it really comes to it practically, how are you finding that you're able to do that in your business?
Sasha Haco:I think I think it's so important. And I think in some ways, it's easier to recruit a diverse team as a female founder than as a white male founder. In some ways, I have it easier maybe than others, but it is really tough. The vast majority of people that apply are very homogeneous, and it is really important to get, you know, diversity. So at the moment we are half male, half female, which is great, but, you know, we want to continue to grow and have all sorts of different voices.
Sasha Haco:I mean, it's something I'm really conscious of and just have to try our best. I don't have a any magic words, I don't think.
Jeremy Silver:It's obviously something that we're all so conscious of now but it's really interesting to hear you saying that. Working in the space that you're in and and thinking about the kind of challenges that you've got, this is such a US dominated space in the commercial world. How do you balance that when you think about what you're trying to do here from within the UK? And one of the things we've got in the UK is incredible academic strength and credentials, but when it comes to commercializing that and to really bring that to market we seem to be less impactful. But what's your sense of do you feel the pull of America?
Jeremy Silver:Do you feel that in in order to for your business to to grow and be successful, you may have to open up over there and spend more time there? Or or do you think that you could really make it work here in in the UK and in in Europe?
Sasha Haco:In the far future, if we want to really achieve our, our goals of being able to, you know, moderate content across the whole internet then that will inevitably mean some point we have to move into the US. For sure. But that said, I think there's a huge amount of opportunity in the UK and Europe as well. I mean, we're looking at online content and there are online websites, apps, forums that happen and are based all over the world. We can go a long way, I think, in the UK and Europe.
Jeremy Silver:Let's hope you stay here for quite some time to come. Sasha. We've seen so far too many companies find their way over to the states and then not come back. But before we finish, a slightly more frivolous question that I've been asking all of my guests, just to sort of finish this thing off with, which is thinking about innovation, thinking about interesting gadgets, thinking about life saving devices that change your life. What's your favorite innovation?
Sasha Haco:Good question. Life saving gadgets. Noise cancelling headphones. I mean, that sounds terrible, but but sort of being able to commute and listen to an audiobook or something has been pretty life changing for me.
Jeremy Silver:Well, I'm quite sure that a very large number of our listeners will be listening to us on noise cancelling headphones, so I'm sure they're probably all in violent agreement with you about that. Thank you for joining us this week, and thank you to my guest, Sasha Hayko, for sharing your entrepreneurial journey so far with us.
Sasha Haco:Thank you very much. That's
Jeremy Silver:all for today's Supercharging Innovation podcast. Thanks for listening. Join us again for the next podcast episode, and make sure you subscribe to us on Itunes or Spotify. Other podcast distribution platforms are, of course, also available. Goodbye.