Voxel51 in Ann Arbor, a leader in visual AI, has closed a $30 million Series B funding round, 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.
The company was founded by a team of machine learning and computer vision experts to help address the failure rate of AI projects. While investments in AI have increased, a recent article in Harvard Business Reviewreported the failure rate of AI projects is estimated to be as high as 80 percent.
With visual data — image and video data make up more than 60 percent of all data traffic — 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 can lead to lengthy development cycles and painful errors in production.
Voxel51 is designed to offer an 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 more accurate and robust, improving team productivity by up to 50 percent and model accuracy by up to 30 percent, company officials state.
Organizations including LG Electronics, Berkshire Grey, Precision Planting, RIOS Intelligent Machines, and Forsight use Voxel51 solutions to help them build 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,” says Lindsey Li, an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners. “As soon as Brian (Moore, founder and CEO of Voxel51) described his vision at Voxel51, we could see the platform’s role as core enterprise AI infrastructure of the future.”
Moore says, “No one would build and tune a race car on a grass field and expect to win a Formula 1 race. 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.”
For more information, visit voxel51.com.
