Funding round will be used to accelerate R&D for data-centric machine learning solutions

ANN ARBOR, Mich., Sept. 21, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Voxel51, a data-centric machine learning software company, announced today that it has raised a $12.5 million Series A funding round from Drive Capital, Top Harvest Capital, Shasta Ventures, and existing investors. The round follows the company’s $2.875M Seed round from eLab Ventures, ID Ventures, and the University of Michigan.

With more than 150,000 monthly active users, Voxel51’s open source technology empowers machine learning model builders to bring transparency and clarity to the datasets they use to build computer vision applications. The recent explosion of computer vision data—there are an estimated 45 billion cameras in the world today—creates a tremendous opportunity for machine learning products, but only if it can be properly organized, indexed, and labeled. Without infrastructure for building high-quality data pipelines, engineers are often forced to misallocate their talents wrangling data.

To address this challenge, Voxel51 is also announcing today the launch of FiftyOne Teams, the company’s enterprise platform that helps organizations bring unbiased machine learning (ML) products to market by unlocking the complexities in their visual datasets, enabling them to understand real-world situations and edge cases. Voxel51’s existing customers are already using the technology to build products in verticals such as retail, security, advertising, agriculture, and robotics.

“We’re proud to be at the forefront of this increasingly important area of machine learning development. High-quality, clean data is critical to the success of ML, and we’re providing key infrastructure for data-centric model development with an open source product to support everyone in the space,” said Jason Corso, Co-Founder and CEO of Voxel51.

“Voxel51 sits at the intersection of several large markets: AI, Perception, and Automation.  Having contributed years of work to the open source FiftyOne project, the founders are deeply technical and are building the type of world class team we look for,” said Andy Jenks, lead investor and general partner at Drive Capital. “Voxel51’s platform is a critical piece of the AI stack for any team looking to develop ML products on accurate and diverse data.”

“Voxel51 immediately stood out for me as an attractive investment because of the quality of the founding team, the quality of the machine learning technology, and the scope of the market opportunity for data-centric AI in image, video, and now 3D data,” said Adam Ghobarah, founder of Top Harvest Capital and former longtime Google executive and partner at Google Ventures. “Voxel51 provides a well-rounded platform for data-centric AI; it has a leading open source solution and now, with FiftyOne Teams, an excellent enterprise companion.”

The fully-remote company will be using the capital to expand its diverse team committed to shaping the future of machine learning in roles focused on product, engineering, community, and more.

To learn more about FiftyOne Teams and try out open source FiftyOne, go to voxel51.com.

Supporting Quotes
“Vision AI has the power to unlock the future of automation in a way we have not seen since the Web Revolution; Voxel51’s product is helping to drive that revolution with FiftyOne’s data-centric tool focus. It’s the right tool for this revolution to leverage as it catapults in the coming years.”
– Issac Roth, Partner, Shasta Ventures

“We’ve used FiftyOne Teams at ADT Commercial for a year now. It has helped us manage our huge datasets, collaborate on model evaluation, tighten our production schedule, and ultimately deliver solutions that help our customers better manage their risk. FiftyOne Teams has added tremendous value to our computer vision processes.”
– Philippe Sawaya, Director of Artificial Intelligence, ADT Commercial

“At eLab, we look for deep-tech innovation AI platforms such as the one the Voxel51 team has produced and we continue to be impressed by their fast pace of growth in the open source community. Their data-centric machine learning software appears to have struck a significant chord in the data scientist community and we are excited to see how additional capabilities are introduced to enable teams of users in the enterprise setting.”
– Doug Neal, Partner, eLab Ventures

About Voxel51
Voxel51 is bringing transparency and clarity to the world’s data. Our open source and commercial software enables developers, scientists, and organizations to build high-quality datasets and computer vision models that power some of today’s most remarkable machine learning and artificial intelligence. Tens of thousands of engineers and scientists have integrated open source FiftyOne into their ML workflows. Enterprise customers spanning verticals like automotive, robotics, security, retail, and healthcare rely on FiftyOne Teams to securely collaborate on their datasets and models. We’re building a fully-remote team of exceptional and diverse people who want to bring data-centric ML to the world. To learn more, visit voxel51.com.

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SOURCE Voxel51