Clarifai builds AI tools to help developers, operators and data scientists automate model development for unstructured data such as images, video, text and audio. The company began as a computer-vision specialist and has expanded to offer NLP, audio recognition, an automated labeling tool called Scribe, and an Edge AI capability for local hardware. It has integrated with Snowflake to link Clarifai’s unstructured-data AI to customers’ data stores. Clarifai more than doubled revenue over the prior year and topped 130,000 users. The company has about 100 employees and plans to double headcount, invest in sales and marketing, and pursue international expansion (it already has an office in Estonia and is exploring Australia, India and Turkey). It is continuing product development and planned further announcements at its Perceive 2021 conference; its Edge AI product has attracted its first commercial client. Clarifai provides image and video recognition technology built on machine-learning systems and accessible via an API, allowing developers to build intelligent applications. Its API recognizes more than 11,000 different concepts and offers domain-specific models such as Not Safe For Work (adult content moderation), Travel, and Food. The company recently released Custom Training to let users teach new concepts and Visual Search to organize and recommend images by visual similarity and keywords. Clarifai's platform predicts more than 1.2 billion concepts in photos and videos every month across applications used by clients from Fortune 500 companies to startups, including BuzzFeed, Trivago, 500px, and StyleMePretty. The company says the technology—previously available only to large tech companies—is now available to anyone through the Clarifai API. It intends to use new funding to expand engineering and business teams, hire key research talent, and continue AI innovation with new product releases. Clarifai develops machine learning algorithms that provide deep understanding of image and video content at scale, initially launching with image recognition in 2013. The system automatically understands video content, recognizes 10,000 different objects and concepts, and processes videos at 10x faster than real-time. The solution is offered through the company’s API and has expanded to incorporate new data sources and support a variety of platforms. Clarifai plans to use the Series A proceeds to hire researchers and engineers and to expand operations. The company raised $10M in Series A venture capital funding led by Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital and Osage University Partners, with participation from Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Nvidia Ventures, Corazon Capital, LDV Capital and New York University. Clarifai was founded by Matthew Zeiler (CEO) and Adam Berenzweig (CTO) and is based in New York City.

Total raised

$100M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series C

Latest activity

Oct 2021