Des Moines computer vision startup Roboflow raised $2.1 million in a new seed round led by Craft Ventures and Lachy Groom, months after graduating from the Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch, Roboflow announced today. The funding round is in addition to $500,000 raised by Roboflow from angel investors following the Y Combinator Demo Day presentation.
The company develops computer visioning software that manages the uploading, labeling and organizing of images used by software developers to train product algorithms. More than 20,000 developers now use Roboflow, and the company is planning to quickly hire additions to the five full-time staff members, including co-founders Joseph Nelson and Brad Dwyer.
“We’ve been fortunate to have really high-caliber, dedicated individuals in the earliest days. Our sixth hire is going to determine the culture of our 10,000th hire,” Nelson said.
The startup is expanding its computer visioning model to manage more of the organizational tasks for developers collecting images and videos for their project — for instance, not just identifying and labeling the differences in images for developers, but automating more of the sorting process.
“We started this company saying it’s inevitable that computer vision is going to be everywhere. Now we can start to see that it really is in every industry,” Nelson said. “Encouraging and promoting and helping that be simpler and easier is going to be the key for [Roboflow] to stay ahead.”