Roboflow announced yesterday the launch of “Roboflow Universe” a community hub that allows anyone to share their computer vision datasets and pre-trained models with the world.
Up until today, everything that users have built with Roboflow has been private to that user’s account. The Roboflow team couldn’t see it, and the broader world couldn’t see it.
“And that makes a lot of sense for many of the commercial use cases that users are working on and building,” said Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of Roboflow. “However, one thing that we’ve learned, and in some sense has been surprised by and encouraged by, is how strong the computer vision community is.”
Now, all Roboflow users will have the option to share their computer visions datasets and pre-trained models with others, enabling the community-at-large to be able to collaborate on projects and bring them to production faster. Roboflow Universe is launching with fifty open source projects. Some of the initial projects include detecting playing cards, finding mushrooms, and identifying plastic in the ocean.
“We’ve seen what the open source movement has done for the proliferation of code,” said Brad Dwyer, co-founder and CTO of Roboflow. “And we want to do the same thing for computer vision, we think by helping you all share your datasets together will help push this industry forward and pull the future towards us.
To date, more than 50,000 developers have used the service, with use cases ranging from protecting endangered species to accelerating microbiology research to cleaning the world’s oceans.
“We think that computer vision is one of those generational technologies, not that different than a mobile phone or your desktop computer, that every industry is going to make use of,” said Nelson. “We think that every company should be able to have access to this technology and be able to implement those capabilities with their existing software engineering teams.”
Along with the new rollout, Roboflow has updated its pricing model, making all of its advanced features free to anyone who makes their projects publicly available.
“At Roboflow we are working not only on creating the tools, but also the community, the education, and the ecosystem around enabling developers to build with computer vision,” said Nelson. And as always, we cannot wait to see what you all build next.”
Previous coverage
Roboflow raises $2.1 million seed round -Jan. 12, 2021
Roboflow accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2020 Batch -Aug. 25, 2020
Roboflow is streamlining the development of computer vision apps -Jan. 23, 2020
