Ann Arbor’s Voxel51 Raises $12.5M to Bring Transparency and Clarity to Computer Data

Voxel51, a data-centric machine learning software company based in Ann Arbor, announced the closing of a $12.5 million Series A funding round from Drive Capital, Top Harvest Capital, Shasta Ventures, and existing investors.
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Machine learning and cognitive computing - 3d rendering
Machine learning software company Voxel51 has closed a $12.5 million Series A funding round to make the ever-growing amount of data clear and transparent. // Stock Photo

Voxel51, a data-centric machine learning software company based in Ann Arbor, announced the closing of a $12.5 million Series A funding round from Drive Capital, Top Harvest Capital, Shasta Ventures, and existing investors.

The round follows the company’s $2.875 million Seed funding round from eLab Ventures, 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.

“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,” says Jason Corso, co-founder and CEO of Voxel51.

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 is also announcing today the launch of FiftyOne Teams, the company’s enterprise platform that helps organizations bring unbiased machine learning (ML) 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. The fully-remote company will be using the capital to expand its diverse team in roles focused on product, engineering, community, and more.

“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,” says 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.”

Adam Ghobarah, founder of Top Harvest Capital, says: “Voxel51 immediately stood out for me as an attractive investment because of the quality of the founding team, the quality of the machine learning technology, and the scope of the market opportunity for data-centric AI in image, video, and now 3D data. Voxel51 provides a well-rounded platform for data-centric AI; it has a leading open-source solution and now, with FiftyOne Teams, an excellent enterprise companion.”