Tribe AI secures Venture Capital After Six years of Bootstrapping to meet growing demand

Despite some opposition, Tribe AI launched in 2019. Thanks to ChatGPT’s 2022 AI boom, Tribe AI has rapidly expanded, transitioning from an AI strategy consulting business to a multimillion-dollar, contractor-driven business that collaborates with major companies such as MyFitnessPal and New Relic. Indie led a recent $3.25 million seed round, which contributed to this growth.

There was a lot of resistance when Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Noah Gale started Tribe AI in 2019 to get businesses to understand how important it was to have an AI strategy.

Gale said that since ChatGPT came out in 2022 and caused an AI craze, the startup has seen a “massive boom” in demand.

Jones, the CEO of Tribe, stated that during her tenure as a growth VP at CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth fund, she recognized the impending challenges. She saw companies like Airbnb and Stripe, which the firm backed, ask Google for help with machine learning and data science.

Before generative AI, Google and Google Cloud were well-known for their machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. For instance, they utilized their ML and AI skills to create

TensorFlow is a popular machine learning training framework. In his job at Gigster, a platform that helps people build software development teams, Gale saw a similar trend.

Rice Nelson said, “These best-in-class new companies were asking Google for help.” “If they weren’t Google, Amazon, or another big tech company, it was way too hard for any company to use this technology”.

The two of them started Tribe AI to help businesses hire contract AI workers. It has since grown into a full-service AI company. Tribe builds things for clients through its network of more than 500 contractors.

The business doesn’t favour any one platform and works with cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, and Google, as well as big language models like OpenAI and Anthropic. It works with companies such as MyFitnessPal and New Relic.

The tribe wouldn’t say how much money they made, but Rice Nelson said the startup was making eight figures a month and is on track to double that this year.

One reason for this is that the company only hires contractors when it needs to, rather than full-time workers. This keeps payroll expenses low.

The New York City-based startup has been self-funded for six years, but it has now raised $3.25 million in a seed round led by Bryce Roberts, the founding partner at Indie, a venture fund that helps early-stage businesses that won’t get much money.

Angel investors, people who are part of Tribe’s AI network, and startup customers were also there.

Tribe’s Expansion Amidst GenAI Surge

She said that since GenAI came along, “the sheer change in demand was palpable.” “The market pull we felt came from more than just customers.

It also came from partners such as Google, AWS, and Azure.” OpenAI and Anthropic were receiving a lot of requests, but they weren’t able to meet them.

The money will help Tribe hire more people to keep up with demand, as well as create a set of tools that will help automate parts of these projects so that the team can work faster on them.

Just like Tribe, other companies want to help others with AI strategy. Rice Nelson believes that the big consulting firms, such as McKinsey and Accenture, are Tribe’s main rivals.

Rice Nelson believes Tribe can compete because it isn’t a new company and doesn’t try to tell customers how to do their projects.

Instead, Tribe wants to give customers the talent and knowledge they need to get their projects done.  She said, “We’ve been around since 2019, long before ChatGPT, and we’ve built hundreds of AI products since then.”