We are proud to share the news that our portfolio company Clarifai has raised a $30M Series B financing led by Matt Murphy at Menlo Partners.

“One of the biggest reasons for our fundraise is to “continue enabling anyone in the world to train and use AI,” says Matthew Zeiler, CEO & Founder, Clarifai.

We first invested in Matthew, their team and the Clarifai vision in June 2014 when “artificial intelligence” was still a matter of science fiction. We invested again in April 2015 in their Series A led by Albert at Union Square Ventures and again in their Series B alongside Menlo Partners, Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, Qualcomm Ventures and other investors.

The Clarifai team has made solid progress adding marquee customers and expanding their developer community. Success never happens overnight and it is always critical to gather brilliant people who collaborate toward a shared vision.

Clarifai was founded in 2013 to solve real-world problems with Artificial Intelligence, starting with visual recognition.  Matthew was working on early Clarifai algorithms at NYU along with his professor Rob Fergus. Clarifai won top awards in the ImageNet Challenge in 2013 beating out teams from IBM, Adobe and other major companies (results).  In June 2014, Rob Fergus, Research Scientist at Facebook AI & NYU Professor gave a presentation highlighting the potential for Clarifai at our annual LDV Vision Summit.

May 2015: Matthew Zeiler, CEO of Clarifai gives a presentation at our LDV Vision Summit “The revenue potential is tremendous for accurately, automatically and efficiently keywording all the videos in the world.”

In a blog post announcing Clarifai’s Series B financing today, Matt outlined their Clarifai vision:

We want to teach computers how to see the world like humans. Recognizing objects is one piece of the puzzle, but by itself, it’s not very “human.” When people see the world, they don’t just see objects. They see complexity, context, and relationships that make up a greater understanding - an understanding that differs from person to person.

So, when we’re building artificial intelligence tools at Clarifai, what we’re really thinking about is human intelligence and how we can amplify it to help solve real-world problems.

We have a really exciting roadmap that continues to position us as the independent A.I. company out there, and the only bottleneck on executing is the number of people in the company. We plan to grow all functions, from research to engineering to developer evangelists to sales and marketing.”  Train your own visual recognition model and search any image with custom training and visual search.

Everyday more of our world is optimized and empowered by people building visual technology businesses. These businesses analyze visual data via computer vision, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Self-driving cars, baby monitors, shopping recommendations, news feeds, mapping, personal assistants, biometrics, gesture recognition and this will exponentially impact every business vertical and become a core part of humanity.  

We are thrilled to continue collaborating and investing in Matt, the Clarifai team and their vision!