Des Moines – South Central Iowa
ROBOFLOW IS STREAMLINING THE DEVELOPMENT OF COMPUTER VISION APPS
Since the early days of artificial intelligence, computer scientists have been attempting to create machines that can see and understand the world as we do.
In recent years, these efforts have led to the emergence of computer vision, a vast subfield of AI and computer science that deals with processing the content of visual data. The field has taken great leaps and has even surpassed humans in many tasks related to detecting and labeling objects.
That said, computer vision is still, in many ways, in its infancy and developers using the technology still face many challenges.
A new Des Moines based company —Roboflow—is looking to change that by removing the pain points that developers come across when creating computer vision and AR apps. Founded by Brad Dwyer and Joseph Nelson, Roboflow offers toolsets that make developing computer vision and AR apps easier.
Roboflow grew out of Dwyer’s award-winning Sudoku solver, Magic Sudoku. Following the success of Magic Sudoku, Dwyer decided to step away from his role as CEO at Hatchlings and focus on AR and computer vision technology.
This past summer, Dwyer hired an intern to help him work on enhancing board games using AR and computer vision. That work led to BoardBoss, an app that enhances board games by using AR
“We had a bunch of hypotheses we wanted to test and we were able to pin things down,” said Dwyer. “What we found out was, while we could build those apps, there’s a lot of pain points in the process of building AR apps that are not solved yet. It’s still this really nascent industry.”
Ultimately, Dywer decided he want to build a developer tool to help other people create computer vision and AR apps and that was the genesis of Roboflow.
