Clarifai was founded in 2013 by Matthew Zeiler in New York City. Zeiler, whose PhD research at NYU on visualizing convolutional neural networks won the ImageNet 2013 challenge, built one of the first commercially available computer vision APIs.
Clarifai raised over $100 million from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Union Square Ventures, and the US Air Force. The company is one of the longest-running AI platform startups, having survived multiple AI hype cycles.
The platform has evolved from a pure computer vision API into a full AI lifecycle platform covering data labeling, model training, deployment, and monitoring. Clarifai now supports computer vision, NLP, audio recognition, and generative AI models, including popular open-source LLMs through its model gallery.
Clarifai serves defense, government, and enterprise customers who need to deploy AI in secure, on-premise environments. The platform is FedRAMP authorized and meets strict compliance requirements that many competitors can’t match.
With over 300,000 developers having used the platform and numerous government contracts, Clarifai occupies a unique position in the AI landscape — it’s both a startup and a battle-tested enterprise platform. The company employs around 150 people and continues to expand its model marketplace and MLOps capabilities.
