Tribe's First Fundraise

After bootstrapping Tribe AI since 2019, we’re excited to share that we raised $3.25M led by Bryce Roberts at Indie, with a full third of that coming from our customers and our network of top AI engineers. Since it’s been a while since we’ve talked about the business publicly – Tribe is an AI-native services company that helps Enterprises build best in class AI products. Our team is augmented by a talent network of over 500 top AI engineers from places like Google, Tesla, Meta and OpenAI who bring both industry and deep technical specialization to our project deployments. These are the people who have built the infrastructure that is powering the AI wave and know it better than anyone. This capital raise will allow us to keep up with demand and build the tools to enable AI service delivery at a tremendous scale. 

Today, every large enterprise wants to use AI to transform its business, but they don’t have the capabilities to do so. At Tribe we see this gap as our opportunity. We’ve built hundreds of AI products, with an eight figure revenue run rate, and growth fueled by deep partnerships with leading Cloud players (AWS, Azure, GCP) and foundation model players (OpenAI and Anthropic). When we first started Tribe we had to convince companies to care about AI; now, in a post-ChatGPT world, every company is scrambling to build their AI strategy and make it a reality. 

After countless customer conversations with leading enterprises, it’s become clear that companies don’t yet know how to build AI products and bring them to market (even the leading Big Tech companies). This plateau in AI value creation is why so much of the focus in AI today is around efficiency vs. step function innovation through novel products and customer experiences. The incremental marginal cost of AI is substantial and no one knows how to account for it. At Tribe, our answer is not just to build best in class technology, but to rethink the business models to monetize them. We all know AI is a new technology frontier, but the opportunity on the business frontier is equally profound – especially for forward looking businesses who can capture the value before it becomes commoditized.

The rate of innovation and complexity in AI will only increase from here with hundreds of billions of dollars being invested into thousands of companies across foundation models, infrastructure and applications, not to mention full-stack platforms from every Big Tech company. The fact that the AI market is so early and dynamic is what makes AI such an incredible opportunity for businesses. At the same time, expecting any individual company without its own AI research lab to manage all of this complexity is too much to ask. Because we are still in the first inning of the biggest platform shift in a generation, AI transformation can’t be a one-and-done, but will require continuous innovation and investment to evolve with the market. 

Tribe helps at every step of the AI engagement cycle. We believe the difference between success and failure in AI will come down to true expertise. In the AI gold rush, there is a growing list of services companies who will claim expertise in Generative AI. The fact stands that businesses need the best engineers working on industry leading infrastructure to realize the potential of AI. This is Tribe’s real differentiation – we are practitioners not consultants, builders not talkers. To date we’ve built hundreds of AI products, with the highest concentration of top AI talent outside of Big Tech. Building AI products is all we do and our work at the forefront of the industry is a core advantage for our customers.