Roboflow Secures $40M Series B Funding to Advance Vision AI Development

Vision AI training and deployment startup Roboflow raises $40M - SiliconANGLE

Vision AI training and deployment startup Roboflow raises $40M Visual artificial intelligence development startup Roboflow Inc. said today it has closed on a $40 million Series B round of funding to continue building the tools developers need to make more advanced AI systems that can see and understand the world. Today's round was led by GV and saw participation from Craft Ventures and Y Combinator, along with Vercel AI Inc.'s Guillermo Rauch, Google LLC's Jeff Dean, and Replit Inc.'s Amjad Masad. The startup has created a comprehensive visual AI development platform that aims to simplify the process of building computer vision models and integrating them into applications. The startup began life as a tool for managing large image sets, but has evolved into an end-to-end solution that provides everything teams need to go from raw image and video data to production-ready vision AI applications. It provides tools for dataset understanding, automated data labeling, model training, fine-tuning and deployment and more. In essence, Roboflow offers developers a step-by-step process for building computer vision into their products, so they can start with uploading the kinds of images or videos they want their application to understand, find a suitable model, and train it to work properly. The platform enables users to annotate images, assess the quality of their datasets, generate new training data, and explore different configurations to see which ones best improve the performance of their models. Once the training process is done, Roboflow simplifies deployment of the finished app to the cloud, edge or even a web browser, and can monitor its performance over time to notify users of degradation. In a blog post, Roboflow's co-founder and Chief Executive Joseph Nelson reeled off a list of examples of the kinds of applications users have already built with its platform. They include medical imaging applications for diagnostics, early wildfire detection systems for firefighters, monitoring systems for coral reefs. Individuals can even create an app that monitors an RTSP feed and tell it to email them when a package arrives on their doorstep, Nelson said. "Visual AI is a platform-level shift similar in impact to the cloud and internet itself," Nelson said. "As software eats the world, a rate limiter is the speed at which computers can understand the visual world." What Roboflow does is use AI to help devices make sense of the world they see, and it has been incredibly successful in that endeavor, with more than 25,000 companies and over one million developers using its open-source tools. Moreover, it has built up a vast collection of more than 500,000 image and video datasets that anyone can use, with over 500 million images and 150,000 pretrained computer vision models available. Users on Roboflow have consumed more than one million graphics processing unit hours to further advanced open-source computer vision. Nelson explained his belief that visual understanding will become a primitive that almost every company will rely on, noting that enterprises already have petabytes of underused visual data assets. "[There are] millions of cameras deployed globally, and billion dollar startups are being built in markets that didn't exist five years ago, thanks to computer vision," he said. An example of this is the startup Relo Metrics Inc., which uses computer vision AI for real-time ad attribution and return on investment in live broadcasts. Previously this was impossible to do. "What previously was prohibitively uneconomic -- cataloging the exact seconds a logo is aired alongside showing a scoreboard during a sports broadcast -- is now possible," he said. Another customer is Pella Corp., one of the world's largest manufacturers of windows and doors, which is using Roboflow to create computer vision models that can check on the quality of its products as they come off the production line. "Maintaining an innovative edge is critical to our strategy at Pella Corporation, and advancements in AI represent an unprecedented opportunity to optimize manufacturing processes and quality controls," said Pella's chief information officer Travis Turnball. "Roboflow has been instrumental in accelerating our learning and deployment of innovative AI solutions to achieve our goal of leading the industry in product quality and delivery for our customers." Looking ahead, Roboflow said the funding from today's round will go towards accelerating research and development, particularly building out the open-source tools it offers, and expanding its community. The company will also look to expand its product, engineering and go-to-market teams.

Exclusive: Roboflow, vision AI startup, raises $40 million Series B

When I met Joseph Nelson, CEO and cofounder of Roboflow, I asked him a question that I ask pretty much everyone: If we randomly met at a party, how would you explain what your company does? "I tell people that Roboflow makes developer tools to create a sense of visual understanding," Nelson told me. But, he added, depending on the person's job, "I then will immediately jump to giving them an example that makes it real for them." Then, for the next ten minutes, Nelson delighted in reeling off different professions and the corresponding visual use cases for Roboflow. For doctors, think medical imaging and diagnostics. Firefighters, how about early wildfire detection? If someone works in environmental research, Nelson points out that Roboflow is already being used to monitor coral reefs and underwater ecosystems. There are so many potential use cases for Roboflow, a computer vision startup, because the company deals in something so fundamental, even primal -- what we see. Roboflow has raised $40 million for its Series B, Fortune has exclusively learned. The round was led by GV, with Craft Ventures and Y Combinator joining along with Vercel's Guillermo Rauch, Microsoft's Jeff Dean, and Replit's Amjad Masad. The company's previous investors include Lachy Groom, Sam Altman, and Scott Belsky. "The amazing thing is that if you think about machine learning, you immediately think of technical teams, and that's right," Nelson told Fortune. "But the truth is, the impact for it is almost everything else, every other place that wants to have a better understanding of the visual world." In short, Roboflow uses AI to make sense of what we see. There are a deluge of enterprise AI platforms out there, but Roboflow is directly linked to the tactile, physical world. It's a clear throughline for Nelson, who grew up hyper-aware of the relationship between technology and real-world environments. Nelson grew up in Iowa, where his family runs a traditional Midwestern row crop farm, primarily growing corn and soybeans. Even today, he still returns for harvest. When Roboflow signed a major farming equipment manufacturer as a customer, that's "when my parents realized that we had a real, real company," Nelson jokes. (He declined to say who exactly, but some web-scouring suggests it's probably John Deere.) The company told Fortune that more than 25,000 organizations build with Roboflow, including more than half of the Fortune 100. In the last 30 days, Roboflow has seen its open source packages downloaded more than one million times. And those downloads suggest a dizzying number of customer use cases that are playing out right now. You have, for example, Pella Windows & Doors, which uses the Roboflow platform to scan products for defects. Automaker Rivian also uses Roboflow for quality control, while Wimbledon and U.S. Open broadcasters are leveraging the company's models for player and ball tracking. BNSF Railway, another Roboflow customer, uses the platform to literally keep trains running. The company uses computer vision to maintain real-time yard inventories, reducing search times and optimizing loading and delivery in yards that can have up to 10,000 containers. A Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary and one of the largest freight railroads in the U.S., BNSF also uses Roboflow for real-time safety inspections. The world is "full of images and things to see, and people making decisions based on what they see," said GV general partner Crystal Huang, who will be joining Roboflow's board. Huang believes that solving these kinds of physical problems represent a largely untapped "greenfield" opportunity, and she sees potential across verticals like manufacturing, logistics, retail, healthcare, and hospitality. Nelson is cognizant of the innate challenge of so many use cases -- after all, if you're known for everything, you can end up being known for nothing. Still, there's an almost-overwhelming sense of scope that makes me think about just how much we see each day, and the extent to which that's our primary source of information. There are a lot of ways to see, some more complete than others. And if you can help people see more clearly, there's a market for that. "As humans, our sight predates our use of language," said Nelson. "The ability to experience the world, understand and synthesize it, is innate to intelligence. And if you think about it, so much software that exists out in the world doesn't have that sense, right? So much is unseen and unknown. But the promise of visual AI is that those things can be improved and better understood." We are so back...ServiceTitan has filed its S-1 for its planned IPO on the Nasdaq. Some headline numbers include the software company's $35.7 million net loss, with $193 million in revenue, for the quarter ending on July 31. Check out the filing here. As always, love hearing your takes. Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today's newsletter. Subscribe here. - QPLIX, a Munich-based wealth management software provider for family offices and private banks, raised €25 million ($26.5 million) in funding from Partech. - Flipturn, a New York City-based EV charger and fleet management platform, raised $11 million in Series A funding. CRV led the round and was joined by Accel. - REBA, a Denver-based data analytics and intelligence platform for the property management industry, raised $10 million in Series B funding from Blueprint Equity. - PSG Equity invested $15 million in CommBox, a Glil-Yam, Israel-based omnichannel AI customer experience platform. Financial terms were not disclosed. - ServiceTitan, a Glendale, Calif.-based business management software provider for services contractors, filed to go public on the Nasdaq. The company posted $685 million in revenue for the year ending July 31, 2024. Battery Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, ICONIQ Growth, and TPG back the company. FUNDS + FUNDS OF FUNDS