Tribe AI raised venture capital to keep up with demand after six years of bootstrapping

When Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Noah Gale launched AI talent and services company Tribe AI in 2019, they had to convince companies that having an AI strategy mattered. After the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and the AI mania it ushered in, the startup has experienced a “massive boom” in demand, Gale told TechCrunch.

Rice Nelson, Tribe’s CEO, told TechCrunch that when she was working as a Growth VP at Alphabet’s growth fund, CapitalG, she saw the writing on the wall. She saw companies the firm was backing — from Stripe to Airbnb — asking Google for help with machine learning and data science.

Before generative AI, Google, and Google Cloud, were known for ML/AI expertise that led it to, for instance, its popular machine learning training framework Tensorflow. Gale noticed a similar trend at his role at Gigster, a platform that builds software development teams.

“These best-in-class emerging companies were asking Google for help,” Rice Nelson said. “It was way too hard for any company, even Silicon Valley tech companies, to leverage this tech if they weren’t Google, Amazon, etc.”

The two launched Tribe AI initially to help companies hire contract AI talent, but it has since turned into a full AI services firm. Tribe uses 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, Google, and large language models including OpenAI and Anthropic. Its customers include companies like MyFitnessPal and New Relic.

Tribe declined to share revenue specifics, but Rice Nelson said the startup has an eight-figure revenue run rate on track to double this year. This was in part because its talent is contracted as needed, not full-time hires, which keeps payroll costs low.

The Brooklyn-based startup has been bootstrapped for the past six years but has now raised a $3.25 million seed round led by Bryce Roberts, the founding partner at Indie, a venture fund that backs early-stage companies that won’t raise much funding. The round also included members of Tribe’s AI network, the startup’s customers and angel investors.

Since GenAI arrived, “the sheer change in demand was really palpable,” Rice Nelson said. “That market pull that we felt, we didn’t just feel it from customers, but also partners like Google, AWS, and Azure. OpenAI and Anthropic, they were getting flooded and inundated and they didn’t have the ability to service that demand.”

So the capital will help Tribe staff up to meet growing demand and will fund the development of a suite of tools to help automate aspects of these projects allowing its team to work on projects more efficiently.

Tribe isn’t the only company looking to help entities with their AI strategy. Rice Nelson sees Tribe’s biggest competitors are the major consulting groups like McKinsey and Accenture. Rice Nelson thinks Tribe can compete because it isn’t a newbie, nor is it looking to tell customers how to do a project but rather to provide the talent and expertise to get their projects done.

“We have been around since 2019, long before ChatGPT and now have experience building hundreds of AI products,” Rice Nelson said.