Another day and another artificial intelligence startup is raising money — and today it’s Clarifai Inc., which closed on a $60 million round led by New Enterprise Associates.

Menlo Ventures, Union Square Ventures, LDV Capital, Corazon Capital and New York University also participated in the Series C round, bringing Clarifai’s total amount raised to date to $100 million.

Clarifai has created various deep learning-based tools developers can use to build smarter apps using unstructured and unlabeled data. The company, which was originally focused on helping companies build apps using computer vision, now provides application programming interfaces for natural language processing, audio recognition and other AI features.

With Clarifai, developers can now easily build a wide range of AI features into their apps using any set of unstructured data. For example, Clarifai’s Scribe Automated Data Labeling tool can be used by developers to automatically label the data they intend to use to train a new model. Then, with a single click, Clarifai handles the training through its collection of model architectures.

Meanwhile, Clarifai’s Spacetime Search uses AI to automatically index a company’s unstructured data so it can be used for deep learning. The company also offers an Edge AI service that layers AI onto data streams using local hardware such as cameras and drones.

Developers can also manage their AI resources more easily with Clarifai. The company offers what’s called an “AI Lake,” which is a kind of data lake for AI training data. Users can use it to manage inputs, concepts, models, workflows and even their applications from a single place.

Clarifai founder and Chief Executive Matthew Zeiler told SiliconAGLE his company’s focus has always been on “democratizing AI” so that even the least experienced software developers can infuse it within their applications easily. To do this, it’s necessary to enable AI on unstructured data, which he said is fundamentally different from doing AI on structured data that’s organized in rows and columns in databases.

“This data, images, video, audio and documents, is orders of magnitude heavier than structured data,” he said. “But up to 90% of the world’s data is unstructured blobs of content that you can’t look into.”

As a result, he explained, “companies that build their software to focus on structured data have a lot of trouble adapting to the demands of deep learning – the technology that powers most AI for unstructured data. They don’t run on GPUs well, they can’t handle data labeling for unstructured data, they don’t have the composable workflows to decompose unstructured data. And they don’t have the AI lake to collect all of your resources in one place.”

Zeiler said that in order to democratize AI for deep learning, it’s necessary to build a platform from the ground up that tailors the developer experience, which is exactly what his company is focused on. “At Clarifai, we have been building on our deep learning AI platform for nearly a decade now, which puts us ahead of the pack with more than 100,000 global users,” he said.

Looking ahead, Clarifai said it intends to expand its global sales, marketing and engineering teams.

Image: Clarifai