03-25-2020

Our Investment in Fritz AI

by Jaclyn Hester

We are pleased to announce our investment in Fritz AI, the machine learning platform for iOS and Android developers. Foundry led a $5M financing alongside our partner fund, Uncork Capital, who co-led the previous round. We were joined by NextGen Venture Partners, Inner Loop Capital, and existing investors Eniac Ventures and Hack VC. 

Based in Boston, Fritz​ AI is an all-in-one solution for edge intelligence. They simplify mobile machine intelligence and enable developers to deploy sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence models in their mobile apps. Making AI/ML easy to use on the edge, Fritz AI helps companies accelerate time-to-market, reduce engineering complexity, add robustness to the AI/ML iteration processes, and ease AI/ML recruiting burdens. 

The product is a mobile-AI-focused SDK + cloud service to assist mobile developers with creating AI/ML solutions for building applications. Leveraging this end-to-end machine learning platform,​​ developers​​ can​​ quickly ​​build, ​​release,​​ and ​​iterate​​ Al/ML models​​ on ​​mobile.​​ This includes dataset gathering, model management, model training, cross-platform deployment, and analytics on AI models and their real-world performance. Fritz ​hosts ​​custom models​​ from​​ developers​​ and​ pre-trained ​​AI/ML models ​​for​​ developers ​​to use. Their vision is to offer a self-service, end-to-end platform that empowers teams to shift focus and resources away from managing complex machine learning projects and towards creating mobile experiences that delight their customers.

Fritz AI fits in Foundry’s Glue theme, and has been used to enable intelligent apps on over 50 million devices worldwide. Fritz AI makes it easy for developers to teach their apps how to see, hear, feel, think, and sense. Using the platform, developers have been able to deploy apps to detect crop disease for farmers in East Africa, power on-device skincare diagnosis and treatment for dermatology patients, and, most importantly, transform a piece of paper into a lightsaber

Co-founders, Dan Abdinoor and Jameson Toole previously worked together at Jana Mobile, where they felt the acute pain point of building AI/ML solutions on mobile and decided to start Fritz AI to solve this problem. We met them several years ago at an Uncork founders summit and were immediately excited by what they were building. 

Fritz AI’s developer-first approach to solving this big, complex, increasingly relevant problem reminds us of our early investments in SendGrid and Mapbox. With millions of apps being deployed on iOS and Android each year, not to mention the increasing number of other intelligent devices ingrained in our daily lives, we see a huge opportunity to support developers in creating incredible interactive experiences for their customers.  

We’re thrilled to welcome Dan, Jameson, and the Fritz AI team to the Foundry portfolio, as they work to bring the power of machine learning to the edge.