New financing led by NEA fuels international expansion, growth of its AI community, and development of new AI innovations.
Clarifai, the leading AI platform for unstructured image, video, text, and audio data, announced that it closed a $60 million Series C funding round. This funding round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from existing investors Menlo Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, LDV Capital, Corazon Capital, NYU Innovation Venture Fund, and new investors CPP Investments, NextEquity Partners, SineWave Ventures, and Trousdale Capital. Andrew Schoen, Partner at NEA, will join the Board. The amount raised brings the company’s total funding to $100 million and will be used to expand its sales, marketing, and engineering teams.
Clarifai’s deep learning AI platform accelerates model development for developers, business operators, and data scientists at the world’s largest organizations by automating every step of the AI lifecycle. Clarifai has expanded significantly beyond Computer Vision and launched essential new capabilities for Natural Language Processing, Audio Recognition, and multiple new products, including Spacetime Search, Scribe Automated Data Labeling, and Flare Edge AI since the company’s Series B in 2016. Scribe was launched last year and enables developers to use AI to automatically label data, which can then be trained at the click of a button using Clarifai’s collection of state-of-the-art model architectures. Most recently, Clarifai started working with customers to deploy its Edge AI capabilities, where AI is layered on top of data streams using different kinds of local hardware ranging from high-power server systems to low-powered devices like camera sensors and drones.
Clarifai also makes it easy for developers to manage all of their AI resources. The same way that a data lake enables seamless data management, Clarifai’s AI Lake allows users to control inputs, concepts, models, workflows, applications, and more, all in one place. Having a consistent and reproducible way of accessing all enterprise AI resources and managing access to these greatly improves governance and increases innovation.
“AI is unleashing enormous value across all industries and will unleash new use cases for years to come, but it cannot realize its full potential until developers of all skill levels can infuse AI into their applications,” said Dr. Matthew Zeiler, founder and CEO of Clarifai. “At Clarifai, we have been building on our deep learning AI platform for nearly a decade now, which empowers over 130,000 global users. We are at the forefront of a new era, Software 2.0, where AI is augmenting and replacing software. With this new round of funding, I am thrilled to continue our strong momentum by growing our incredible team and expanding our AI capabilities to continue to be the Software 2.0 platform of choice.”
The Series C funding will allow Clarifai to fuel its international expansion by hiring more team members in its global sales, marketing, and engineering departments, augmenting its longstanding commitment to bringing AI to developers worldwide. The funding follows a banner year for Clarifai. In 2020, Clarifai more than doubled its revenue.
“Clarifai’s AI stack stands out as the platform of choice for the world’s most demanding and agile developers,” said Andrew Schoen, Partner at NEA. “Clarifai empowers anyone (not just data scientists) to utilize machine learning and to unlock the value of unstructured data. We were inspired by Clarifai’s vision to make AI available to the world’s 50 million developers and are thrilled to partner with the Clarifai team to catalyze the adoption of machine learning.”
Clarifai will announce a series of innovations at Perceive 2021, Clarifai’s annual AI conference, held on October 20 and 21, and is gearing up to be Clarifai’s most significant launch event in its history. To register for the event, visit https://www.clarifai.com/perceive-2021.
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