Why We Invested in Roboflow
Today we’re pleased to announce that Craft Ventures is leading the $20 million Series A round of Roboflow, a powerful developer tool enabling individuals, teams, and enterprises to harness the power of computer vision. We previously led their seed round alongside Lachy Groom in 2020. David will be joining the Board of Directors and Arra will be a board observer.
We first met Joseph and Brad when they were participating in YC. After using the product, we could see that Roboflow had created a tool that enables any developer — not just ones with machine learning expertise — to harness the power of computer vision. Their thesis, that machine learning can be transformative in almost any industry, has been proven out over the last year, as they now work with customers across diverse industries with myriad use cases. For example, models built in Roboflow are used to:
- Power quality assurance at Pfizer for packaging essential products
- Recognize pills in pharmaceutical contexts
- Detect assembly defects in manufacturing
- Identify weeds and disease in agriculture
- Track fish populations with underwater cameras
- Manage inventory in retail
- Automate readings of glucometers and other patient health data
- Count office occupancy with Covid return-to-work
- Use drones to inspect the quality of electricity infrastructure
- Build robots that can automatically change tires
Hobbyist superfans even use Roboflow to detect raccoon break-ins in their yards or when packages have arrived on their front porches.
Computer vision is a complex technology that typically requires machine learning expertise and lots of data. Roboflow’s end-to-end platform enables software teams to create production-ready models in a fraction of the time than was previously possible. Their tooling enables better image collection, management, annotation, training, deployment, and active learning. Roboflow’s public datasets allow users to contribute to and aggregate data to make everyone’s models more accurate. Users can also explore Roboflow Universe to leverage existing public models.
Joseph and Brad are a strong technical duo who have surrounded themselves with teammates and advisors like Calvin French-Owen, Mike Maples, and Kevin Hartz, who round out the dream team. We’ve gotten to know the team over the last year since leading the seed round and continue to be inspired by their big vision. We’re eager to see how great minds leverage computer vision in the years to come and expect Roboflow to lead the way.
Congratulations to the Roboflow team!
– David Sacks and Arra Malekzadeh