Visual artificial intelligence development startup Roboflow Inc. announced today that it has closed a $40 million funding round to continue building the tools developers need to create more advanced AI systems that can see and understand the world.

Today’s Series B round was led by GV and saw participation from Craft Ventures and Y Combinator, as well as Guillermo Rauch of Vercel AI Inc., Jeff Dean of Google LLC and Amjad Masad of Replit Inc.

The startup has created a comprehensive visual AI development platform that aims to simplify the process of creating computer vision models and integrating them into applications. The startup began life as a tool for managing large image sets, but has evolved into a solution that provides everything teams need to move from raw image and video data to vision AI applications ready for production. It provides tools for understanding datasets, automated data labeling, model trainingfocus and deployment and more.

Essentially, Roboflow provides developers with a step-by-step process for integrating computer vision into their products, so they can start by uploading the types of images or videos they want their app to understand, finding a suitable template and train it to function properly. .

The platform allows users to annotate images, assess the quality of their datasets, generate new training data, and explore different configurations to see which ones best improve the performance of their models. Once the training process is complete, Roboflow makes it simple to deploy the completed application to the cloud, edge, or even a web browser, and can monitor its performance over time to notify users of any degradation.

In a blog postJoseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of Roboflow, compiled a list of examples of the types of applications users have already created with his platform. They include medical imaging applications for diagnosis, forest fire early detection systems for firefighters, and coral reef monitoring systems. Individuals can even create an app that monitors an RTSP stream and tell it to email them when a package arrives at their door, Nelson said.

“Visual AI is a platform-level change that is similar in impact to the cloud and the Internet itself,” Nelson said. “As software eats the world, a rate limiter is the speed at which computers can understand the visual world.”

Roboflow uses AI to help devices make sense of the world they see, and it has seen incredible success in this effort, with more than 25,000 companies and more than a million developers using its open source tools . In addition, he built a extensive collection of over 500,000 image and video datasets that anyone can use, with over 500 million images and 150,000 pre-trained computer vision models available. Roboflow users have consumed over a million graphics processing unit hours to advance open source computer vision.

Nelson explained his belief that visual understanding will become a primitive that almost every business relies on, noting that businesses already have petabytes of underutilized visual data assets. “(There are) millions of cameras deployed around the world and billion-dollar startups are being created in markets that didn’t exist five years ago, thanks to computer vision,” he said. he declared.

One example is startup Relo Metrics Inc., which uses computer vision AI for real-time ad attribution and ROI in live streams. Previously, this was impossible to achieve.

“What used to be extremely unprofitable – cataloging the exact seconds a logo is broadcast along with a scoreboard during a sports broadcast – is now possible,” he said.

Another customer is Pella Corp., one of the world’s largest window and door manufacturers, which uses Roboflow to create computer vision models that can verify the quality of its products as they come off the production line.

“Staying ahead of the innovation curve is critical to our strategy at Pella Corporation, and advances in AI represent an unprecedented opportunity to optimize manufacturing processes and quality controls,” said Travis Turnball, Pella’s chief information officer. “Roboflow has been instrumental in accelerating our learning and deployment of innovative AI solutions to achieve our goal of leading the industry in product quality and delivery to our customers.

Roboflow said the funding in today’s round will be used to accelerate research and development, particularly to expand the open source tools it offers and expand its community. The company will also look to expand its product, engineering and marketing teams.

Images: Roboflow