Roboflow was founded in 2020 by Joseph Nelson and Brad Dwyer in Des Moines, Iowa. The company provides an end-to-end platform for building computer vision applications, covering everything from dataset creation to model deployment.
Roboflow raised over $40 million, including a $20 million Series A led by Craft Ventures in 2023. The company’s growth reflects the expanding demand for visual AI in manufacturing, agriculture, retail, and logistics.
The platform supports the full computer vision workflow: users upload images, annotate them (with AI-assisted labeling), augment datasets, train models (using architectures like YOLO, SAM, and Florence), and deploy them to edge devices, cloud, or mobile. Roboflow’s Universe hosts over 250,000 public datasets and pre-trained models contributed by the community.
Roboflow was an early adopter of Meta’s Segment Anything Model (SAM), integrating it into their annotation tools to dramatically speed up image labeling. The platform also supports zero-shot and few-shot models that can identify objects without custom training.
Over 250,000 developers and companies use Roboflow, from solo makers to Fortune 500 enterprises. The company’s focus on developer experience — with clear documentation, pre-built integrations, and open-source contributions — has made computer vision more accessible. Roboflow employs around 50 people.
