Continuations

Today our portfolio company Clarifai has announced its $30 million Series B financing led by Menlo Ventures. It constitutes an important milestone in the history of the New York City startup ecosystem: generous early backing for an ambitious technology vision. I have been around the NY technology and startup world since the late 90s. There were a lot of justified knocks against the efforts here. It was difficult to find engineers for startups. Well, Google helped solve that by locating a majo...

This past Saturday was Video Hackday in New York City. It had been organized by the team at Ziggeo with the help from many others, including a great roster of sponsors. I enjoyed participating and wrote a little hack that you can see here. Even though I am pretty rusty as a developer, I managed to write something that let’s anyone ask a written question (which then lives at its own URL – all handled via Firebase) and others can answer by recording a video response (recording and playback from...

Today the team at Clarifai is releasing an amazing second version of their API that makes two breakthroughs available to every developer: custom training and fast visual search. The beauty of Clarifai’s API when it first launched was that you could be up and running in minutes and get great results with their models. But what if you wanted to train your own concepts? Well, if you were a bigger customer willing to pay, Clarifai would train a custom model for you. With the newly released versio...

If you are like me and use your phone as your only camera, then eventually you wind up with thousands of pictures in your camera roll. That often means that when you want to show off a specific picture to friends or share it via email you wind up swiping furiously to find it. That stops today (ok, today if you are on iOS and you’ll have to wait a bit for Android). Just download the Forevery Photo App.The app is powered by our portfolio company Clarifai’s image and video recognition technology...

Today’s blog post is over at USV.com announcing our investment in Clarifai, a deep learning company based in New York City. I have written a fair bit about machine learning and artificial intelligence here on Continuations. We have made a number of investments in this area already including HumanDX and Sift Science. I believe that we are at the beginning of an extraordinary expansion of the possible. And I am thrilled to be supporting another effort with Clarifai.