The purpose of money is to purchase the freedom to pursue that which was useful and interesting. — Benjamin Franklin
Blazing the Visual Intelligence trail
Our company recently completed a major round of funding led by Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI-focused venture fund. This funding secures the resources we will need for the next several years, but the investment is not simply a matter of money. The funding is validation of the Zorroa Visual Intelligence (ZVI) platform, and enhances our ability to confidently work with strategic partners and customers, and perhaps most significantly, marks the next stage in the evolution of our focus.
We launched ZVI last April, giving our initial customers a powerful, configurable, visual-processing pipeline that rapidly and automatically organizes assets from anywhere in an enterprise, including on-premise server farms to any number of cloud platforms. Now we need to fine tune that flexibility to meet the needs of customers in new markets, and expand its scalability to handle thousands of cloud-based customers.
Gradient, with its Google connection, is helping us do that by working with strategic partners in key markets. Gradient also gives us access to domain experts in applied AI, deep learning, and machine-learning techniques, who will help us move even faster in scaling ZVI up and delivering solutions that solve even more difficult challenges for our customers.
Part of a bigger plan
This next stage in our evolution isn’t an accident. It’s part of our long-term strategy to make visual intelligence a reality and to position ZVI at its center. When Beth and I started Zorroa four years ago, we knew that this stage would come only after validation from a partner like Gradient provided independent confirmation that we had the right product and the right approach.
Up to now, we’ve been laser-focused on development, solving the basic challenges of building our platform to effectively integrate visual search and analytics into a business-intelligence pipeline. Now that we have a base of customers using the platform, we’re extending the core platform to meet the needs of specific markets and customers — customers who are already on board with the platform as well as those who will be joining us in coming weeks and months.
And the pattern of our growth reflects this evolution. Only six short months ago, we were focused on technical development. We’re still in the market for the best engineers, of course, and we’ve been expanding our candidate searches to include business development, marketing and program managers who will listen to our customers and translate their specific needs into engineering requirements and specifications.
Here we grow again
Our journey so far has been exhilarating, and we’re eager to start this next stage as we deploy into new markets with new challenges and specialized needs. We’re looking forward to working with these new customers to discover new ways that ZVI can extract value for real companies. Interested in taking the ride with us? Come join the team. We’re hiring!
Originally published at https://zorroa.com on August 1, 2018.
