How this exciting funding round will help make visual AI a reality
Today we have some exciting news to share! Voxel51 has raised $30M in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from new investor Tru Arrow Partners and existing investors Drive Capital, Top Harvest Capital, Shasta Ventures, and ID Ventures.
This milestone marks an exciting inflection point in our growth at Voxel51, and it comes at the cusp of an AI-driven revolution. It’s clear that AI is here to stay, fueled by a unique mixture of simultaneous advancements in hardware, algorithms, and an explosion of new use cases that stimulate the imagination and, importantly, are causing organizations to think deeply about how to unlock the value in their massive stores of unstructured data through AI-powered products and services.
At Voxel51, we’re especially excited about the rapid progress of visual AI. Image and video data is everywhere, making up a majority of all data traffic. Use cases from defect detection, to augmented reality, to autonomy are reaching production every day. Advancements in generative AI bring promises of personalized product experiences and solutions for roadblocks like data diversity and the prohibitive cost of human annotation. Visual data is a critical input to solving society’s most challenging problems, and visual AI provides the reasoning that will close the loop on general intelligence systems that will solve them.
In short, visual AI is poised to explode
When Jason and I decided to open source FiftyOne back in 2020, we did so out of a deep belief in the value of transparency, both in making data openly accessible within teams and in responsibly shaping AI’s future. We’re also strong believers in the role that builders—software and ML engineers—play in AI through the core technologies they adopt and build around. Fast forward to today, FiftyOne has been downloaded millions of times and is now being used by tens of thousands of teams to manage, collaborate, and refine their data and models. Leading organizations like Bosch, LG Electronics, Berkshire Grey, and many others across diverse industries from agriculture, to manufacturing, to robotics have made FiftyOne Teams a central part of their AI infrastructure.
Yet, while AI investment is exponentially growing, almost 80% of AI projects are still not production-ready. When we talk to companies across industries about their challenges, we consistently hear that they’re held back by limitations of off-the-shelf foundation models for real use cases and inflexible “end-to-end” platforms that cannot adapt to meet the unique needs of their use cases nor integrate into their environments. As a result, organizations are all too often forced down an increasingly unaffordable and unsustainable path of training larger models on ever-larger datasets of uncertain quality and then hoping for success in production.
Voxel51’s products help our customers and users build dramatically better AI systems by bringing their models and data together in one place where they can orchestrate and automate workflows for examining, curating, evaluating, and iterating on their data and models, together. We provide the connective tissue that brings harmony to their AI processes and pushes projects into production.
We’re incredibly grateful for the support of everyone who’s helped us reach this milestone—our investors, advisors, open source FiftyOne community, customers, and partners. Each and every contribution has helped us get where we are today, and we are thankful for you!
Looking to the future, we’re thrilled to have the support of great investors to accelerate our mission to make visual AI a reality. Our new funding will allow us to scale our team, double down on our investment to support our open source community, build out a research team to bridge the scientific gap in understanding what’s happening in your data, and accelerate our product roadmap to support new data modalities, unlock the next level of dataset scale, and deepen our integrations with other key parts of the AI stack.
If this mission excites you, join us! We’re hiring across all roles. If you’re interested in partnering with us, please reach out. We’re ready to help.
