ANN ARBOR–Voxel51, a machine learning software developer, announced that it has raised a $12.5 million Series A funding round from Columbus, Ohio-based Drive Capital, and Menlo Park, Calif.-based Top Harvest Capital LLC and Shasta Ventures, and existing investors.
The round follows the company’s $2.875 million seed round from San Mateo, Calif.-based eLab Ventures, Detroit-based ID Ventures, and the University of Michigan.
With more than 150,000 monthly active users, Voxel51’s open source technology empowers machine learning model builders to bring transparency and clarity to the datasets they use to build computer vision applications. The recent explosion of computer vision data—there are an estimated 45 billion cameras in the world today—creates a tremendous opportunity for machine learning products, but only if it can be properly organized, indexed, and labeled. Without infrastructure for building high-quality data pipelines, engineers are often forced to misallocate their talents wrangling data.
To address this challenge, Voxel51 also announced the launch of FiftyOne Teams, the company’s enterprise platform that helps organizations bring unbiased machine learning products to market by unlocking the complexities in their visual datasets, enabling them to understand real-world situations and edge cases. Voxel51’s existing customers are already using the technology to build products in verticals such as retail, security, advertising, agriculture, and robotics.
“We’re proud to be at the forefront of this increasingly important area of machine learning development. High-quality, clean data is critical to the success of ML, and we’re providing key infrastructure for data-centric model development with an open source product to support everyone in the space,” said Jason Corso, co-founder and CEO of Voxel51.
“Voxel51 sits at the intersection of several large markets: AI, Perception, and Automation. Having contributed years of work to the open source FiftyOne project, the founders are deeply technical and are building the type of world class team we look for,” said Andy Jenks, lead investor and general partner at Drive Capital. “Voxel51’s platform is a critical piece of the AI stack for any team looking to develop ML products on accurate and diverse data.”
The company will use the capital to expand its diverse team committed to shaping the future of machine learning in roles focused on product, engineering, community, and more.
To learn more about FiftyOne Teams and try out open source FiftyOne, go to voxel51.com.
Voxel51 is bringing transparency and clarity to the world’s data. Tens of thousands of engineers and scientists have integrated open source FiftyOne into their ML workflows. Enterprise customers spanning verticals like automotive, robotics, security, retail, and healthcare rely on FiftyOne Teams to securely collaborate on their datasets and models.