Clarifai, once known as the young computer vision startup working with the Pentagon on its controversial Project Maven, has distanced itself from its early years of espousing questionable ideas on AI ethics, its interest in building autonomous weapons — years before Silicon Valley warmed up to defense tech — and its potential cyberbreach from Russia.
For the past few years, the company has focused on building AI tools for enterprise and government customers. Now, the company is unveiling the latest chapter in that trajectory: the ability for users to orchestrate, or coordinate, compute and resources across all their compute sources from a single control panel.
Washington D.C.-based Clarifai announced today at AWS re:invent that its vendor-agnostic AI lifecycle platform can now automate management, allocation and optimization of computing resources to run workflows based on factors like cost and performance all in a single platform. Matthew Zeiler, the founder and CEO of Clarifai, told TechCrunch that this atomization helps its customers scale their AI more efficiently while better utilizing the compute resources they have.
“It’s really exciting for us and will give us a whole new entry point to the market,” Zeiler said. It works with the company’s existing stack.
The company released its control center dashboard in October, which allowed companies to view their compute sources all on one platform regardless of whether they were stored in the cloud or stored in on-premise machines. Today’s announcement adds another layer of functionality to the system.
“A customer can manage all those different clusters from one central place, whether they are from the cloud providers but also if you have your own bare metal machines,” Zeiler said. “You can connect either of those and multiple of each in an secure way.”
One of the key ways Clarifai helps streamline costs and resources, Zeiler said, is the platform’s ability to bundle smaller AI models from different sources together which gives customers more opportunity to better control their compute resources.
“When we talked to enterprises, that’s what they care about right now,” Zeiler said. “The cost of compute is extreme when it comes to AI. This kind of solution helps them manage it in one wave and one set of tools.”
Clarifai was founded in 2013 by Zeiler and was originally focused on computer vision. The company has since expanded into a vendor-agnostic full-stack AI tools provider to help enterprise customers with tasks such as data labeling, AI model training and AI workflows.
The startup has helped build more than 1.5 million AI models and counts companies including OpenTable, Siemens and Canva as customers, among others.
The company has raised more than $100 million in VC funding. Clarifai most recently raised $60 million in a 2021 round led by NEA that valued the company at $775 million, according to PitchBook data. The company is also backed by VCs including USV, Menlo Ventures and Lux Capital, among others.
