I’m delighted to announce that we raised $12.5 million in Series A funding from new investors Drive Capital, Top Harvest Capital, and Shasta Ventures as well as existing investors eLab Ventures and ID Ventures. This financing allows us to accelerate the next phase of our growth in bringing data-centric machine learning to the world.
Since we started Voxel51 in October 2018, we’ve been building open source and commercial software that enables developers, scientists, and organizations to build high-quality datasets and computer vision models that are powering some of today’s most remarkable machine learning and artificial intelligence. Our software provides the infrastructure for these users to analyze and modulate their datasets allowing them to address critical issues like data bias.
One of our first big milestones was in August 2020 with the launch of the open source FiftyOne project. Since then, FiftyOne has seen incredible growth and adoption. Today FiftyOne is used by tens of thousands of engineers and scientists and has reached 150,000+ monthly active machines, 1900+ GitHub stars, and 1000+ members in our Slack community. We’re grateful for everyone in the enthusiastic and growing FiftyOne community — for your support, contributions, and for being a part of this journey with us!
Late last year, we began working with dozens of startups and Fortune 500 enterprises as early adopters of FiftyOne Teams, our commercial product that enables teams to securely collaborate on their datasets and models. Our early adopters span a variety of industries — automotive, robotics, security, retail, healthcare, and more — including large organizations, which are typically risk averse; a testament to the utility and value that FiftyOne Teams provides! By providing us with real-world usage, input, and feedback, our early adopters helped us shape and harden the FiftyOne Teams solution that we’re publicly announcing today. (You can find the full press release here.) A huge shoutout and thank you to all of our early adopters for making FiftyOne Teams ready for the broader ML/AI community to enjoy!
So… what’s next for Voxel51? It’s no secret that there has been an explosion of visual data. For example, there are an estimated 45 billion cameras in the world today, and the growth will continue to accelerate for decades. This creates a tremendous opportunity for computer vision applications, but only if the data can be properly organized, indexed, and labeled.
As Voxel51 enters its next phase of growth, we’re doubling down on our commitment to build FiftyOne alongside the community so that it remains the leading open source tool for building high-quality datasets and computer vision models. We’re also accelerating the development of FiftyOne Teams as critical and trusted infrastructure for managing organization’s visual data, enabling them to build machine learning systems based on high quality, transparent data that brings their ML-powered products to market faster.
We’re going to need many more exceptional and diverse people to achieve our mission of bringing transparency and clarity to the world’s data. If our mission excites you, check out our open positions across product, engineering, community, and more.
Thank you to everyone who has supported Voxel51 over the years — our amazing team, investors, customers, partners, and open source community. Today is a significant milestone on our journey and I’m excited for many more to come!
Jason Corso
CEO and Co-founder, Voxel51
