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Voxel51 Raises $30M Series B Funding to Make Visual AI a Reality

New financing led by Bessemer Venture Partners will expand go-to-market operations and accelerate product roadmap

ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 16, 2024 — Voxel51, the leader in visual AI, today announced that it has closed a $30M Series B funding round. The round was 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. Voxel51 will use this funding to scale up its go-to-market organization, expand its community, invest in AI research and accelerate its roadmap to meet the growing market demand for solutions that unlock the value of visual AI.

Voxel51 was founded by a team of machine learning and computer vision experts to help address the distressing failure rate of AI projects. While investments in AI have exploded, a recent article in Harvard Business Review reported that the failure rate of AI projects is estimated to be as high as 80%. With visual data, such as the image and video data that already make up over 60% of all data traffic, becoming an increasingly important part of AI projects, the complexity and difficulty of building successful AI applications only increases. All too often, the culprit behind these failures is the struggle to put visual data to work in building production-ready AI models and applications—today’s fragmented, inflexible tools and clunky manual processes lead to lengthy development cycles and painful errors in production.

Voxel51 offers the antidote to those headaches, transforming the way that AI engineers and teams build visual AI. Voxel51 provides the leading refinery for data + models, where AI builders can simplify and automate their workflows to explore, visualize, curate and test datasets and put them to use to build models and applications. Tens of thousands of AI builders rely on Voxel51’s open source FiftyOne and enterprise FiftyOne Teams offerings to build production-ready visual AI that is dramatically more accurate and robust, improving team productivity by up to 50% and model accuracy by up to 30%. Innovative organizations including LG Electronics, Berkshire Grey, Precision Planting, RIOS Intelligent Machines and Forsight use Voxel51 solutions to help them build innovative visual AI solutions that improve product quality, ensure safety and increase efficiency.

“Traditional enterprises have increasingly sophisticated AI and ML teams with complex workflows that still include painful manual processes,” said Lindsey Li, investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. “As soon as Brian described his vision at Voxel51, we could see the platform’s role as core enterprise AI infrastructure of the future. We’ve been impressed by the entire team and their elegant and differentiated solution as a true orchestration layer for customers to build AI-forward and AI-native applications, faster and more easily. We are thrilled to partner with the team to build and scale their continued success.”

“No one would build and tune a race car on a grass field and expect to win a Formula 1 race,” said Brian Moore, CEO and co-founder of Voxel51. “Yet, organizations building visual AI are all too often forced to build and fine-tune models with mislabeled, inadequate and under-representative data and then hope for success in production. We’re helping our customers and community build better AI applications by bringing their models and data together in one place, and we’re thrilled to have the support of great investors to accelerate our mission to make visual AI a reality.“

This new fundraising round is a milestone enabled by the momentum demonstrated since the close of its Series A funding round:

  • 4x increase in community membership and engagement 
  • 6x growth to over 2 million downloads of the open source FiftyOne project
  • 10x increase in ARR for the commercial FiftyOne Teams offering

That growth has been supported by continued innovation delivered by the Voxel51 team, including the following recent highlights:

  • Integration of FiftyOne and NVIDIA Omniverse to help autonomous vehicle developers create, curate, and visualize robust synthetic training data to maximize AI model performance
  • Native vector search integrations with engines including Pinecone, MongoDB, Redis, Qdrant and more to enable fast, easy search through billions of images
  • Introduction of VoxelGPT, a natural-language interface to FiftyOne that makes it possible for users to leverage large language models (LLMs) to rapidly and easily gain insights about visual data

“FiftyOne Teams is critical to getting our AI models into the real world,” said Matt Shaffer, VP of Artificial Intelligence and Co-Founder at RIOS Intelligent Machines. “It’s the hub that powers our AI workflows, from data management to model refinement, enabling us to deliver AI-powered robotics into production lines rapidly and reliably to help our customers improve food packaging, reduce waste, and improve safety for any person on the factory floor.”

To learn more:

About Voxel51

Voxel51 is helping organizations make visual AI a reality. Our open source and commercial software enables teams to build high-quality datasets and computer vision models that power leading machine learning and artificial intelligence applications. Tens of thousands of engineers and scientists have integrated open source FiftyOne into their workflows, and enterprise customers spanning from automotive, robotics, security and retail to healthcare rely on FiftyOne Teams to securely collaborate on datasets and models. We’re building a fully-remote team of exceptional and diverse people who want to bring visual AI to life. To learn more, visit voxel51.com.