When Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Noah Gale Founded an AI Talent and Services Company Tribe Artificial Intelligence in 2019, they had to convince companies that having an AI strategy matters. After ChatGPT released in 2022 and the AI craze it ignited, the startup saw a “huge surge” in demand, Gale told TechCrunch.
Tribe CEO Rice Nelson told TechCrunch that when she was a growth VP at Alphabet’s growth fund, CapitalG, she saw the writing on the wall. She saw companies the company backed—from Stripe to Airbnb—asking Google for facilitate with machine learning and data science.
Before generative AI, Google and Google Cloud were known for their expertise in machine learning/AI, leading them to the popular TensorFlow machine learning training framework, for example. Gale noticed a similar trend in his role at Gigster, a platform that builds teams of developers.
“These best-in-class emerging companies were asking Google for help,” Rice Nelson said. “It was too difficult for any company, even Silicon Valley tech companies, to leverage that technology unless they were Google, Amazon, etc.”
Tribe AI was initially launched to facilitate companies hire AI talent, but has since evolved into a full-fledged AI services company. Tribe leverages its network of over 500 contractors to build products and projects for clients. The company is platform agnostic and has partnerships with cloud providers including AWS, Azure, and Google, as well as huge language models including OpenAI and Anthropic. Its clients include companies like MyFitnessPal and Fresh Relic.
Tribe declined to provide revenue details, but Rice Nelson said the startup has an eight-figure revenue run rate that is expected to double this year. That’s partly because its talent is hired on an as-needed basis rather than full-time, which keeps payroll costs low.
The Brooklyn-based startup has been bootstrapping for the past six years, but has now raised $3.25 million in a seed round led by Bryce Roberts, a founding partner at Indie, a venture capital fund that backs early-stage companies that won’t get a massive funding raise. The round also included members of the AI Tribe network, the startup’s customers, and angel investors.
Since GenAI came along, “the huge shift in demand has been really tangible,” Rice Nelson said. “That pull to the market that we felt, we felt it not just from customers, but from partners like Google, AWS, and Azure. OpenAI and Anthropic were getting flooded and flooded, and they couldn’t handle that demand.”
This capital will facilitate Tribe employees meet growing demand and also fund the development of a set of tools that will facilitate automate aspects of these projects, allowing the team to work on them more efficiently.
Tribe isn’t the only company looking to facilitate entities with their AI strategy. Rice Nelson believes that Tribe’s biggest competitors are huge consulting groups like McKinsey and Accenture. Rice Nelson believes that Tribe can compete because it’s not a novice or trying to tell clients how to do a project, but rather providing them with the talent and expertise to get their projects done.
“We’ve been around since 2019, long before ChatGPT, and we have experience building hundreds of AI products,” Rice Nelson said.