Databricks and
Voxel51 are excited to announce a partnership that unlocks a new era of scalable, data-centric multimodal AI. As more organizations adopt computer vision, they often struggle to manage and make sense of massive amounts of visual data. This partnership brings together Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform with Voxel51’s powerful tools for visual data understanding and analysis.
Powering visual AI systems in automotive tech, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and beyond, this joint solution enables computer vision teams to have full control over their data so they can build faster and more reliably.
AI teams are inundated with visual data, but starving for insights
Visual data is everywhere. From autonomous vehicles, retail shelves, industrial automation, satellite imagery, and medical diagnostics, organizations developing AI heavily rely on it. And yet, despite having more visual data than ever, most AI teams struggle to make meaningful use of it.
The common impulse is to “just add more data.” But without visibility into what that data contains, teams end up with bloated, noisy datasets that rarely move the performance needle. Even with a lakehouse full of visual data, it’s still difficult to answer:
- What data is redundant, mislabeled, or low-quality?
- Where are my model’s blind spots and failure cases?
- What samples do I actually need to augment or relabel?
Without tools to explore, retrieve, and understand visual data at scale, teams waste time and compute, chasing performance improvements that never materialize.
The backing of an open, scalable Data Intelligence Platform, coupled with an intuitive visual intelligence and data engine, is critical to handling the speed, scale, and complexity of today’s AI systems.
Unifying Databricks infrastructure with Voxel51’s visual layer
This partnership brings together the core components of a modern visual AI workflow:
- Databricks provides a scalable data infrastructure backbone with:
- Voxel51 provides an interactive visual intelligence layer and data engine to annotate, explore, curate, and analyze visual datasets and models.
Teams building AI applications can now pair Voxel51’s rich visualization and analysis capabilities with
Databricks Vector Search engine for seamless embedding generation, indexing, and discovery—all governed through Databricks Unity Catalog.
This provides the best of both worlds: the power of Databricks’ cloud-scale infrastructure and enterprise-grade governance, with the intuitive control of FiftyOne’s visual interface.
Together, the integrated solution enables:
- Unified access to multimodal data (image, video, 3D, audio) to visualize, build, and augment high-quality datasets directly from Databricks Unity Catalog (a centralized governance layer for all data and AI assets) and Databricks Volumes (the native storage layer for data and files).
- Semantic and hybrid search (e.g., image or text queries) powered by Databricks Vector Search and Voxel51
- Embeddings generation using foundation models in Databricks, visualized interactively in FiftyOne
- Integrated model evaluation workflows in FiftyOne to surface failure modes and data gaps
- Automated labeling QA pipelines to verify, tag, and improve annotations in context
What makes this solution stand out in production is its tight integration and scalability. Teams can create a Vector Search index backed by a Delta table of embeddings, and Databricks handles everything from storage and access control to REST-based querying. The result is a fast, governed, and seamless way to explore and manage visual datasets, whether it’s thousands or billions of visual data samples.
Built for enterprise AI development
Every enterprise AI use case is different, and so are the data and infrastructure requirements. This strategic partnership provides the essential components that vision teams need to move from raw data to production-quality datasets and models. And it all happens on infrastructure that scales.
The joint solution brings together Databricks’ trusted data and AI platform and Voxel51’s visual intelligence layer to help teams build, refine, and deploy computer vision systems at scale—faster, more securely, and with full control over data quality.
- Faster iteration: Visualize, curate, and evaluate massive multimodal datasets directly from Unity Catalog and speed up model development
- Smarter search: Run high-speed similarity search over millions of images and videos using natural language or visual examples.
- Better models: Identify edge cases, label issues, and failure modes to improve training data.
- Secure integration: Build secure multimodal AI natively on Databricks with Delta Lake and Unity Catalog for governance.
- Flexible and extensible: Supports cloud, hybrid, and airgapped environments with plugin extensibility so teams have the flexibility to adapt for specific use case scenarios.
What’s next: bringing auto-labeling to Databricks
As we work together, our next milestone is to bring
Voxel51’s Verified Auto Labeling technology directly into Databricks, enabling scalable, production-grade annotation workflows powered by foundation models and Databricks compute. By allowing ML teams to run large-scale, configurable auto-labeling pipelines using Databricks, organizations can use foundational AI models to enable faster, cheaper, and more efficient dataset annotation and curation at production scale.
The future of Visual AI/ML
As foundation models and scalable infrastructure continue to evolve, the bottleneck in real-world AI is shifting from algorithms to the quality, curation, and deep understanding of data. The future of visual AI lies in data-centric, multimodal systems where competitive advantage comes not from bigger models, but from better, more explainable data.
The Databricks and Voxel51 partnership gives AI teams the full-stack solution they need to tackle that: from fast, secure data infrastructure to intuitive, visual tools that put human understanding back into the loop.
If you’re working on multimodal or vision-based AI, we’d love to show you what this looks like in practice.
Request a demo to see how Databricks and Voxel51 can help you build smarter, faster, and more reliable AI systems with your visual data.
