Clarifai is a privately held American artificial intelligence company headquartered in New York City.

^[0]It utilizes deep learning technology, a form of machine learning, to develop APIs for image and video recognition use by developers and businesses.

History

The company was first founded in 2013 by New York University computer science graduate student Matthew Zeiler ^[1]after his deep learning research attracted attention at ImageNet (also known as ILSVRC, or the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge), a competition that tests the latest advances in algorithmic models for object detection and image classification in digital images ^[6].

Zeiler's work placed in the top 5 at the 2013 ImageNet competition, alongside Google, Microsoft and Baidu Inc. Since then it has received over $10 million in funding from investors such as Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures and Union Square Ventures.

^[2]The company works closely with the artificial intelligence arm at Googlex.

Technology

Clarifai's deep learning technology today is derived from Zeiler's deep learning research as a PhD student at NYU, where he studied under the pioneers of neural networks.

^[3]Zeiler's work helped popularize the use of neural networks in machine learning and contributed to the rise of deep learning.

Building on previous work by artificial intelligence researchers such as Yann LeCun, his research centered on uniquely designed convolutional neural network models for image classification and object detection, including a hierarchical convolutional deep learning model ^[4]and a visualization technique that makes use of supervised pre-training to expose the inputs that stimulate individual feature maps at any layer in the convolutional model ^[5].