Roboflow has secured $40M to make computer vision applications accessible to all
Computer vision platform Roboflow recently announced a $40 million funding round led by GV (Google Ventures), with participation from existing investors Craft Ventures and Y Combinator. The round also attracted notable tech industry figures including Guillermo Rauch, Amjad Masad, and Jeff Dean, alongside Valor and Frontline. This new funding will support Roboflow's mission to "make the world programmable" as its computer vision solutions continue to help organizations of all sizes take advantage of their typically underutilized visual assets.
Roboflow is building a platform that lets developers easily build computer vision applications based on raw images and video by providing them with tools for dataset management, automated labeling, model training, and deployment. According to Roboflow, over 25,000 organizations, including several Fortune 100 companies. For instance, US-based door and window manufacturer Pella is using Roboflow to ensure its products are shipped without defects, while BNSF Railway is using Roboflow to develop visual AI for train and inventory tracking. An impressive measure of Roboflow's success comes from the fact that it still held most of its prior financing at the time of raising the current funding round.
In addition to its enterprise solutions success, Roboflow has also seen substantial growth in its open source community. Over one million developers have downloaded Roboflow's open source tools in the past month alone. The platform's community hub, Roboflow Universe, now hosts more than 500,000 user datasets, 500 million images, and 150,000 pretrained computer vision models. Meta recently featured how Roboflow estimates that the widespread adoption of the Segment Anything models has saved about 74 years' time across its community after being used on over 60 million polygons.