CrowdFlower raises $10M to bring AI to every business

SAN FRANCISCO, June 7, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- CrowdFlower, the essential human-in-the-loop platform for data science teams, today announced its recent $10M venture funding. The investment round was led by Canvas Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and Microsoft. The capital will be used to fuel the adoption of CrowdFlower AI which combines training data, machine learning and human-in-the-loop in a single platform.

"We've seen companies like Tesla and Uber build large data science teams and adopt AI and machine learning to solve billion dollar problems like driverless cars," said Lukas Biewald, founder and chief executive officer at CrowdFlower. "But we wanted to bring AI and machine learning within the reach of every business to attack million dollar problems such as classifying customer support tickets or generating customer insights from social data. With CrowdFlower AI, companies can now easily deploy machine learning models that are commercially viable at a much lower price point." 

"CrowdFlower has built a great human-in-the-loop platform serving data science teams," said Rebecca Lynn, cofounder and partner at Canvas Ventures. "With their new AI product, CrowdFlower is making it easier and faster for businesses to adopt machine learning. Our team at Canvas has long been involved in AI with early investments in Siri and Nuance. We believe corporate boardrooms are increasingly making AI a priority, and CrowdFlower will be a key player in that trend."

With CrowdFlower AI, customers can now easily create machine learning models using human-labeled training data from within the CrowdFlower platform. These models can then be deployed using humans-in-the-loop for when the model's predictions fall below a customer defined confidence threshold. For the first time companies now have a single platform that can convert instructions in plain English to commercially viable machine learning models that replace humans in some part of a business process.

"At Microsoft, we're looking to create experiences for people and businesses where technology intelligently supports what they're doing," said Nagraj Kashyap, corporate vice president, Microsoft Ventures. "CrowdFlower's approach – combining human and machine intelligence to solve all types of unstructured data problems – aligns with that effort. We look forward to supporting them in their next phase of growth in the broader machine learning and AI market."

"The industry has been focused on who has the best algorithms," said Biewald. "But when we talked with our data science customers we saw that wasn't the problem preventing them from adopting AI more broadly. They wanted to find a way to take AI from the science lab to the board room. To do this they need both enough human labeled training data to get started, and then humans-in-the-loop to handle the cases where the model wasn't confident enough in its prediction. So we decided to solve these two problems in a single platform."

To learn more about CrowdFlower AI, visit ai.crowdflower.com.

About CrowdFlower
CrowdFlower is the essential human-in-the-loop platform for data science teams. CrowdFlower is focused on making data useful by helping data teams collect, clean and label their data at scale. The CrowdFlower platform combines human-labeled training data, easy to deploy machine learning, and human-in-the-loop capabilities to help companies create value from their unstructured data.

Headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Canvas Ventures and Trinity Ventures, CrowdFlower serves data science teams at Fortune 500 and fast-growing data-driven organizations across a wide variety of industries. For more information, visit www.crowdflower.com.

About Canvas Ventures
With partners named to the NY Times "Top-20 VC" list in 2016 and the Forbes Midas Lists of "Top-100 VCs," Canvas is a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm focused on making early-stage investments in software and services companies. Canvas partners include Rebecca Lynn, Gary Little, Paul Hsiao, and Ben Narasin. The partners have led primarily Series A & B investments in CrowdFlower, Eden, Everwise, FutureAdvisor, HealthLoop, Totango, Transfix, Viewics, and Zola since founding the firm in 2013. With its thesis-based approach to investing, Canvas continues to establish itself as the go-to firm for big data/analytics, enterprise SaaS, fintech, digital health, and marketplaces. For more information, visit www.canvas.vc.

About Trinity Ventures
Trinity Ventures is a top-tier venture capital firm combining business insight, practical expertise and a personal touch to help start-ups win big. For over twelve funds, Trinity has helped passionate entrepreneurs with breakthrough ideas transform markets and lives. Trinity's investment team takes a collaborative approach and believes in personal engagement, mutual respect and goal alignment to deliver out-sized returns to entrepreneurs and investors. The firm invests in early stage technology companies with emphases on Cloud and Mobile Infrastructure, Software-as-a-Service, Digital Media, and Social and Mobile Commerce. For more information, visit www.trinityventures.com.

SOURCE CrowdFlower

Related Links

http://www.crowdflower.com