Today we celebrate V7's 5th birthday! We revisit our beginnings and reflect on what the last 5 years have meant for us.
Heather Stritch
Senior Content Marketing Manager at V7
Today, V7 celebrates 5 full years spent helping machines to see like humans. Fueled by a mission to solve the world’s most crucial tasks, the business has backed life-changing projects from Merck, GE Healthcare, and Boston Scientific. It has advanced the approach, accuracy, and outcomes, of building contemporary AI models. And, it has continued to give back to the machine learning community, with passion-project gifts like BenchLLM.
We take some time to revisit V7’s origin story and reflect on what the last five years have meant for the business.
The founding story of V7: From Aipoly to Darwin
Having originally met at a Hackathon, V7 founders, Alberto Rizzoli and Simon Edwardsson shared an appetite for innovations that would benefit the wider world. This led to their multi-award-winning work on Aipoly in 2015, a computer vision app that offered real-time aid to blind and visually impaired people. Placing both our founders firmly on the technological map, Aipoly was described as “truly visionary” and today, has scanned over 2 billion projects and has been translated into 26 languages.
Following the success of Aipoly, our founders set their sights on the next project: a platform that would empower any business to develop state-of-the-art AI models, with ease.
In the words of V7 founder Alberto Rizzoli:
“The next generation of software won’t run on code, it will run on models fueled by training data. We let our clients easily turn human knowledge into AI models, improving the safety and accuracy of AI. This is incredibly powerful, and in the right hands, can literally save lives. If we want to build software that tackles unsolved frontiers in human health, or our climate, this is the only way”.
Founded in 2018, V7 earned some early recognition driven by a successful beta launch at globally renowned conference, CVPR. Emboldened by the positive response at CVPR, the founders formally launched V7’s Darwin in December 2019 - securing signups from over 500 teams in the process.
What followed was a succession of triumphs, from successful Seed and Series A investment rounds to hitting key milestones that saw V7 scale from a team of two to just over 120 members of staff in 2023.
Today, V7 customers report a 33% faster release of models and a 25% reduction in errors on average - within just 6 months of implementing V7. A particularly impressive feat, given the “AI Infrastructure Ecosystem” survey states that 61% of businesses see a return on their investment within the first two years.
V7 today
Today, V7 has secured $40+ million in funding, with backing from the likes of Air Street Capital General Partner Nathan Benaich, Deepmind Director of Research, Oriol Vinyals, and Inventor of Transformers Ashish Vaswani. It has won awards, earned industry applause, and, just this year, was listed among Sifted’s Top 10 Tech Companies of 2023.
The business has survived early-stage startup hurdles, has scaled through a global pandemic, and is steadfastly riding the AI hype wave with five years of hard-earned experience on its side. It has proudly supported thousands of use cases, spanning MedTech, Life Sciences, Energy, Retail, Agriculture, Construction, and everything in between. It has also continued to lead from the front, triggering innovations that have evolved training data infrastructure, annotation processes, and model training - for the better.
The road ahead for V7
As AI, computer vision, and machine learning take center stage, V7 is proud to support its innovators from behind the scenes.
In our five years of business, we’ve watched companies use Darwin to create cancer-detecting models, robots to safely handle nuclear waste, and energy solutions designed to tackle our most pressing climate challenges.
We’ve dedicated research and commercial innovation to the advancement of this industry, exemplified by our BenchLLM release just this month.
Finally, we’ve weathered highs and lows with our talented team, scaling five years with a collection of people who embody and drive our passion for a bright future in AI.
While it’s anyone’s guess what’s next for this industry, one thing can be said for V7 - we’re honored to be a part of it.
Join V7 in shaping the future of AI, by diving headfirst into a free trial of Darwin.
