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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 major engineering center in the city, which stopped the cycle of NY tech startups being acquired by West Coast companies and relocated there. I have called this Google’s gift to NY.
There had been no billion dollar exits. Well, Etsy, Shutterstock, Jet and Tumblr have started to solve that. More companies are on a trajectory to going public. There have been multiple exits in the hundreds of millions of dollars including Huffington Post, Makerbot and Buddy Media. There is now not only proof that it can be done but also a group of active angel investors who have been part of one of these successes.
People said you could not do hard technology in New York. That it would all be content, commerce and at best some ad tech. Well MongoDB (born as 10gen) has built a global database business from its headquarters here in New York city with most of the engineering team sitting just a stone throw from Times Square.
The final knock was that if you had a truly ambitious technology vision you could not get it funded in New York. And it was in fact still quite difficult for 10gen to raise their early rounds. Clarifai has proven that this last knock no longer stands. We led a $10 million Series A and now the company has raised a $30 million Series B. Matthew Zeiler, Clarifai’s founder & CEO, describes the rationale well:
One of the biggest reasons for our fundraise is to continue enabling anyone in the world to train and use AI.
The company’s vision is to level the AI playing field. And that is one big vision that requires the kind of funding that historically had been associated only with Silicon Valley. I encourage everyone to read more about it on the Clarifai Blog.