When Jacqueline Rice Nelson and Noah Gale launched AI talent and services company Tribe AI in 2019, the duo had to convince companies of the importance of having an AI strategy. Since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, which sparked an AI boom, the startup has seen a “massive boom” in demand, Gale told TechCrunch.
Tribe CEO Reiss Nelson told TechCrunch that he saw an early sign when he was working as VP of growth at Alphabet's growth fund CapitalG, when companies it backed (from Stripe to Airbnb) were looking to Google for help with machine learning and data science.
Before the advent of generative AI, Google and Google Cloud were known for their ML/AI expertise, which led to the popular machine learning training framework Tensorflow, for example. Gale noticed a similar trend in his work at Gigster, a platform for building software development teams.
“These best startups were looking to Google for help,” Rice-Nelson said. “It was just too hard for anyone who wasn't a Google or an Amazon to leverage this technology, even Silicon Valley tech companies.”
The two initially launched Tribe AI to help companies hire contract AI talent, but the company has since transformed into a full AI services company. Tribe uses a network of over 500 contractors to build products and projects for its clients. The company is platform agnostic and partners with cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google, as well as large-scale language models like OpenAI and Anthropic. Customers include companies like MyFitnessPal and New Relic.
Tribe declined to disclose revenue details, but Rice Nelson said the startup expects its revenue to double this year at an eight-figure rate, in part because it keeps labor costs low by contracting talent on an as-needed basis rather than hiring them full-time.
After bootstrapping the startup for the past six years, the Brooklyn-based startup has now raised $3.25 million in a seed round led by Bryce Roberts, founding partner at Indie, a venture fund that helps early-stage companies that can't raise large amounts of capital. Members of Tribe's AI network, startup customers and angel investors also participated in the round.
Since GenAI's arrival, “a major shift in demand was evident,” says Rice-Nelson, “and the market traction we felt was not only from customers, but also from partners like Google, AWS and Azure. OpenAI and Anthropic were inundated with demand and didn't have the capacity to meet it.”
As such, the funding will help Tribe hire more people to keep up with growing demand, and also fund the development of a suite of tools to automate aspects of these projects so the team can work on them more efficiently.
Tribe isn't the only company looking to help companies with their AI strategies. Rice Nelson sees Tribe's biggest competitors as big consulting groups like McKinsey and Accenture. Rice Nelson believes Tribe can compete because it's not the new kid on the block, and it's not trying to tell clients how to do projects, but rather providing the talent and expertise to get them done.
“We've been around since 2019, long before ChatGPT, and now have experience building hundreds of AI products,” Rice Nelson said.