Clarifai
Headquarters
New York, NYFounded
2013CEO / Founder
Matt ZeilerEmployees
201-500Funding
Series C — $100MProducts
1 product listedAvg. AI Score
7.7/10Website
www.clarifai.com
Profile updated
About Clarifai
Clarifai is an artificial intelligence company founded in 2013 by Matt Zeiler, who won the ImageNet computer vision competition that year while completing his PhD at NYU. Headquartered in New York City, the company provides a full-stack AI platform that enables organizations to build, train, and deploy machine learning models across computer vision, natural language processing, and audio recognition use cases.
Clarifai's platform includes tools for data labeling, model training, workflow orchestration, and deployment, targeting enterprise customers across industries such as defense, media, retail, and healthcare. The company offers pre-built models alongside custom training capabilities, and its platform supports deployment across cloud, on-premises, and edge environments. Notable customers and partners have included U.S. government agencies and large enterprises requiring scalable AI infrastructure.
Clarifai has raised approximately $100 million in total funding across multiple rounds, including a $60 million Series C round closed in 2021. The company has grown its headcount to the low hundreds and has expanded its platform positioning over time, rebranding its focus toward compute orchestration for AI workloads. Zeiler has remained CEO since the company's founding.
Specialties
Financials
Dated, source-cited figures. Estimates are marked.
Products by Clarifai
All products by Clarifai reviewed by our AI panel of experts.
How Our Review Panel Scores Clarifai
Six independent reviewer personalities assessed Clarifai's product on their own terms. They landed within 0.6 points of each other, an unusually strong consensus.
Averaged across 1 reviewed product in our catalog. Scores are out of 10.
Competitive Landscape
Who Clarifai competes with, and how they differ.
Roboflow specializes purely in computer vision (dataset labeling, training, deployment) with a heavier open-source/developer-tool motion, while Clarifai bundles vision with generative AI (LLM routing, RAG, vector search) and on-prem/government deployments Roboflow does not pursue.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Vertex AI bundles vision, video and generative AI models inside Google's broader cloud stack and bills by compute consumption, whereas Clarifai sells a standalone, cloud-agnostic platform aimed at teams that don't want hyperscaler lock-in, including air-gapped government deployments.
2 products reviewed on TopReviewedRekognition is a narrower, pay-per-call image/video moderation and facial-analysis API billed through AWS, without Clarifai's model training, LLM tooling, or on-prem/edge deployment options.
Azure AI Vision ships as a component of Microsoft's Cognitive Services suite, tightly coupled to Azure infrastructure and billing, versus Clarifai's cloud-agnostic platform that also serves air-gapped government and defense customers.
9 products reviewed on TopReviewed
Scale AI's core business is human-in-the-loop data labeling and RLHF data pipelines for frontier model labs, a services-heavy model, while Clarifai sells self-serve data labeling as one module inside its broader inference platform.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewed
Hugging Face is an open model hub and inference marketplace built around community distribution, while Clarifai targets enterprise and government buyers with managed vision/generative-AI pipelines and compliance features Hugging Face does not offer.
1 product reviewed on TopReviewedCompany Timeline
Key milestones in Clarifai's history, with sources.
- Acquisition
Nebius acquires Clarifai's core engineering team and licenses its inference technology
Nebius (NASDAQ: NBIS) announced Clarifai's founder Matthew Zeiler and its core engineering/research team joined Nebius, which acquired Clarifai's patent portfolio covering AI inference and compute orchestration and received a non-exclusive, perpetual license to its inference/reasoning technology stack. The deal excluded Clarifai's legacy computer vision models and its US government and defense business.
nebius.com - Milestone
Marked 10th anniversary by launching first full-stack generative AI platform
On its 10-year anniversary, Clarifai launched what it billed as the industry's first full-stack generative AI platform, adding serverless inference for diffusion and LLM models, prompt engineering, LLM routing and evaluation, and a built-in vector database on top of its existing computer-vision platform.
prnewswire.com - Funding
Series C — $60M led by New Enterprise Associates
Clarifai closed a $60 million Series C round led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from Menlo Ventures, Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, LDV Capital, Corazon Capital, NYU Innovation Venture Fund, CPP Investments, NextEquity Partners and SineWave Ventures, bringing total funding to $100 million.
prnewswire.com - Funding
Series B — $30M led by Menlo Ventures
Clarifai raised a $30 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Union Square Ventures and Lux Capital, bringing total financing to $41.25 million at the time.
techcrunch.com - Funding
Series A — $10M led by Union Square Ventures
Clarifai raised $10 million in Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital, Osage University Partners, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Nvidia Ventures and NYU.
venturebeat.com - Founded
Clarifai founded by Matthew Zeiler
Matthew Zeiler founded Clarifai in New York in 2013 after placing in the top five of that year's ImageNet image-classification challenge, building the company on his ZFNet deep-learning research from NYU.
en.wikipedia.org
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