Roboflow is a company of a thousand use cases.
When I met Joseph Nelson, CEO and cofounder of Roboflow, I asked him a question that I ask pretty much everyone: If we randomly met at a party, how would you explain what your company does?
"I tell people that Roboflow makes developer tools to create a sense of visual understanding," Nelson told me. But, he added, depending on the person’s job, "I then will immediately jump to giving them an example that makes it real for them."
Then, for the next ten minutes, Nelson delighted in reeling off different professions and the corresponding visual use cases for Roboflow. For doctors, think medical imaging and diagnostics. Firefighters, how about early wildfire detection? If someone works in environmental research, Nelson points out that Roboflow is already being used to monitor coral reefs and underwater ecosystems. There are so many potential use cases for Roboflow, a computer vision startup, because the company deals in something so fundamental, even primal—what we see.
Roboflow has raised $40 million for its Series B, Fortune has exclusively learned. The round was led by GV, with Craft Ventures and Y Combinator joining along with Vercel’s Guillermo Rauch, Google's Jeff Dean, and Replit’s Amjad Masad. The company’s previous investors include Lachy Groom, Sam Altman, and Scott Belsky.
"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."
In short, Roboflow uses AI to make sense of what we see. There are a deluge of enterprise AI platforms out there, but Roboflow is directly linked to the tactile, physical world. It’s a clear throughline for Nelson, who grew up hyperaware of the relationship between technology and real-world environments. Nelson grew up in Iowa, where his family runs a traditional Midwestern row crop farm, primarily growing corn and soybeans. Even today, he still returns for harvest. When Roboflow signed a major farming equipment manufacturer as a customer, that’s "when my parents realized that we had a real, real company," Nelson jokes. (He declined to say who exactly, but some web-scouring suggests it’s probably John Deere.)
The company told Fortune that more than 25,000 organizations build with Roboflow, including more than half of the Fortune 100. In the last 30 days, Roboflow has seen its open source packages downloaded more than one million times.
And those downloads suggest a dizzying number of customer use cases that are playing out right now. You have, for example, Pella Windows & Doors, which uses the Roboflow platform to scan products for defects. Automaker Rivian also uses Roboflow for quality control, while Wimbledon and U.S. Open broadcasters are leveraging the company’s models for player and ball tracking. BNSF Railway, another Roboflow customer, uses the platform to literally keep trains running. The company uses computer vision to maintain real-time yard inventories, reducing search times and optimizing loading and delivery in yards that can have up to 10,000 containers. A Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary and one of the largest freight railroads in the U.S., BNSF also uses Roboflow for real-time safety inspections.
The world is "full of images and things to see, and people making decisions based on what they see," said GV general partner Crystal Huang, who will be joining Roboflow’s board. Huang believes that solving these kinds of physical problems represent a largely untapped "greenfield" opportunity, and she sees potential across verticals like manufacturing, logistics, retail, healthcare, and hospitality.
Nelson is cognizant of the innate challenge of so many use cases—after all, if you’re known for everything, you can end up being known for nothing.
Still, there’s an almost overwhelming sense of scope that makes me think about just how much we see each day, and the extent to which that’s our primary source of information. There are a lot of ways to see, some more complete than others. And if you can help people see more clearly, there’s a market for that.
"As humans, our sight predates our use of language," said Nelson. "The ability to experience the world, understand and synthesize it, is innate to intelligence. And if you think about it, so much software that exists out in the world doesn’t have that sense, right? So much is unseen and unknown. But the promise of visual AI is that those things can be improved and better understood."
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See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Correction, Nov. 19, 2024: The email version of this story misstated Jeff Dean's professional association.
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