Voxel51 Raises $30M to Enhance Generative AI's Understanding of Visual Data

Voxel51 has secured $30 million in funding to advance its visual AI platform, aimed at decreasing the failure rate of AI projects. The company identifies a key issue: many AI models are not effectively trained to interpret data accurately. Voxel51's solution focuses on enabling developers to create robust, production-ready AI for seamless integration into their applications.

The investment round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with contributions from Tru Arrow Partners, Drive Capital, Top Harvest Capital, Shasta Ventures, and ID Ventures. Voxel51 plans to utilize these funds to enhance support for new data modalities, scale datasets further, and strengthen technology integrations. Additionally, the company aims to expand its sales, marketing, and support teams while growing its AI research team and increasing contributions to open-source projects.

“No one would build and tune a race car on a grass field and expect to win a Formula 1 race,” stated Voxel51 CEO and co-founder Brian Moore. “Yet organizations working on visual AI often build and refine models using inadequate, mislabeled, and unrepresentative data, hoping for success in production. We’re committed to helping our customers improve AI application development by bringing their models and data together.”

Enterprise organizations like LG Electronics, Berkshire Grey, Precision Planting, RIOS Intelligent Machines, and Forsight utilize Voxel51’s solutions, including the open-source project FiftyOne and its enterprise counterpart, FiftyOne Teams. This technology reportedly enhances team productivity by up to 50% and boosts model accuracy by as much as 30%.

As a leader in computer vision, Voxel51 is attracting interest across various sectors, including agriculture, aviation, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and security. Its technology supports applications like helping self-driving cars interpret their surroundings, assisting farmers in crop assessments, and enabling healthcare professionals to enhance patient diagnoses.

“Voxel51 empowers AI builders to collaboratively develop models and applications using visual data more efficiently, facilitating the creation of innovative AI solutions that elevate product quality, enhance safety, improve efficiency, and provide better customer experiences,” the company states.

In today's multimodal AI landscape, organizations need to be strategic in their model development. Neglecting to manage datasets properly can lead to model bias and hallucinations, undermining AI effectiveness. This challenge is compounded by the fact that most data traffic consists of images and videos rather than text.

This $30 million investment follows Voxel51's Series A round raised nearly two years ago, bringing its total funding to approximately $46 million. The company has not disclosed its current valuation.