US-based deep learning technology producer Clarifai raised $30m in series B capital yesterday from investors including Qualcomm Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of wireless technology provider Qualcomm.
Menlo Ventures led the round, while spinout-focused venture capital fund Osage University Partners and VC firms Union Square Ventures and Lux Capital also participated, as did a range of unnamed investors.
Founded in 2013, Clarifai has created image and video recognition technology that relies on artificial intelligence (AI) to understand depicted concepts, for example extracting a list of ingredients from a photograph of food. The platform is used to detect more than 1.2 billion concepts per month.
The round, which lifts Clarifai’s total funding to more than $41m, will help the company drive recruitment across its engineering, business and research teams. It will also accelerate new product releases.
Qualcomm Ventures previously took part in Clarifai’s $10m series A round in May 2015, alongside GV and Nvidia Ventures, subsidiaries of internet and technology group Alphabet and graphics processing units developer Nvidia respectively.
The series A round was led by Union Square Ventures and included Osage, New York University, Corazon Capital, LDV Capital and Lux Capital.
New York University, GV, Qualcomm Ventures, Nvidia Ventures, Corazon Capital and LDV Capital had already supplied $1.25m in a 2014 seed round.
Matt Zeiler, founder and chief executive of Clarifai, said: “This new funding enables us to supercharge our innovation and continue our mission to create an AI platform that makes powerful AI tools available to the masses.”
– The original version of this article appeared on our sister site, Global University Venturing.