Roboflow, a computer vision startup founded in Des Moines, has raised $40 million in venture capital funding, the company announced Tuesday in a blog post.
The Series B round was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) along with existing investors Craft Ventures and Y Combinator. New investors for the startup in this round are Valor, Frontline, Guillermo Rauch, Amjad Masad and Jeff Dean.
The round follows a $20 million Series A round and a $2.1 million seed round, both raised in 2021, according to Crunchbase.
Computer vision is a type of artificial intelligence that allows computers to derive information from photos, videos and other visual media. Machine learning models are trained to recognize patterns and features that can then be applied on new photos and videos.
The company, founded in 2019 by Joseph Nelson and Brad Dwyer, builds tools to help software developers and enterprises across industries develop computer vision applications.
“Simply, visual AI is a platform-level shift similar in impact to the cloud and internet itself. As software eats the world, a rate limiter is the speed at which computers can understand the visual world,” Nelson and Dwyer wrote in the blog.
Roboflow’s tools are used by more than 25,000 companies, including more than half of Fortune 100 organizations, according to the blog.
In an exclusive interview with Fortune, Nelson said Roboflow’s tools have grown in versatility because the sense of sight matters to every industry, from software companies to those in manufacturing and construction dealing with physical infrastructure.
“The amazing thing is that if you think about machine learning, you immediately think of technical teams, and that’s right,” Nelson told Fortune. “But the truth is, the impact for it is almost everything else, every other place that wants to have a better understanding of the visual world.”