PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Matroid, the leading U.S. computer vision (CV) provider and a world leader in machine learning, today announced it has raised $20 million in Series B funding led by Energize Ventures with participation from existing investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Intel Capital, and others. The new financing brings total funding to $33.5 million. Building on the enterprise success of its product, Matroid plans to leverage the new funding to accelerate product development and go-to-market expansion in manufacturing, industrial IOT (IIOT), and video security markets. Within manufacturing and IIOT, Energize’s corporate investors include General Electric, Schneider Electric, Caterpillar, Invenergy, and others.
Software-defined sensors that operate on imagery captured by regular cameras are quickly becoming the pinnacle sensor. Sensors are critical for many enterprises, federal agencies, and public safety organizations. But a variety of factors have limited the scope of deployments, including the complexity, corner-cases, and training costs associated with building video and machine learning pipelines of sufficient throughput, in a manner where a deployment can happen in minutes, instead of months. The Matroid product enables non-software organizations in enterprise to harness the power of software-defined sensors. Founded in 2016 by Stanford engineers and professors with world-class expertise in AI, machine learning, and computer Vision, Matroid unlocks the promise of software-defined sensors through unmatched ease of use in the entire deployment lifecycle.
“Enterprises have tasted the value that software-defined sensors can provide, but are also feeling the pain of rolling out a conventional computer vision team,” said Reza Zadeh, CEO and Founder of Matroid. “Deployments of CV are constrained by Machine Learning engineering time, operator training time, camera interoperability, scaling AI computations, and the difficulty of iterating on neural networks performing important tasks like detailed inspection. With the Matroid product, we set a new standard for ease of use in deploying sensors. With this funding we are excited to take the next steps to bring software-defined sensors to manufacturing and industrial IOT enterprises.”
“Reza and the Matroid team are building a world-class platform that marries the expertise of engineers and operators with next-generation computer vision technologies and machine learning algorithms,” said John Tough, Managing Partner of Energize Ventures. “The Energize team is excited to deploy our financial, operational and industry capital to help Matroid capture market share in energy, industrials and IoT.”
“As the renewable sector continues to grow, we must be on the forefront of new innovations and tools to push us into the future — new digital technologies like Matroid will expedite the energy transition,” said Michael Polsky, Founder and CEO of Invenergy. Invenergy is a leading privately held, global developer and operator of sustainable energy solutions, and currently uses video data captured from drones to analyze the state of its wind turbines and other renewable energy sites.
About Matroid
Matroid is an easy-to-use and intuitive studio for creating and deploying detectors (computer vision models) to search visual media for people, behavior, objects, and events -- no programming required. Once a detector is developed, Matroid can search any live stream or recorded video, providing real time notifications when the object of interest has been detected. Customers use Matroid in construction, manufacturing, security, media, retail and other industries. Matroid reduces operating costs associated with manually searching through video footage for an object or a specific person, and increases efficiency, safety, and regulatory compliance. Matroid can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise. www.matroid.com
About Energize
Energize Ventures is a pre-growth venture capital firm located in Chicago. We partner with entrepreneurs to advance the next generation of energy and industry by investing in software and business model innovations. Since it was founded in 2016, Energize has made 14 investments spanning cybersecurity, mobility, data analytics, operational efficiency and distributed assets. For more information on Energize Ventures, please visit www.energize.vc.
