# Introducing Roboflow Labs: Advancing the Frontier of Real World Capabilities

> Source: <https://blog.roboflow.com/roboflow-labs-launch/>
> Published: 2026-09-30 15:23:29+00:00

Roboflow is building the visual cortex for artificial intelligence.

Every day, millions of developers around the globe and over half of the Fortune 100 use Roboflow to [__count cells__](https://blog.roboflow.com/cancer-research-computer-vision/) to accelerate cancer research, improve [__construction site safety__](https://blog.roboflow.com/preventing-accidents-on-construction-sites-with-computer-vision/), [__digitize floor plans__](https://blog.roboflow.com/floor-plan-analysis-computer-vision/), [__preserve coral reef populations__](https://blog.roboflow.com/reefos-supercharging-coral-reef-restoration-with-ai/), [__guide drone flight__](https://blog.roboflow.com/georeferencing-drone-videos/), and much more. Roboflow has been cited in [over 13,000 research papers](https://research.roboflow.com/citations?ref=blog.roboflow.com). 

Today we're announcing [__Roboflow Labs__](https://labs.roboflow.com/?ref=blog.roboflow.com), our new applied research division dedicated to advancing the frontier of real world capabilities and helping teach models to see, reason, and act in three dimensions and across industries.

Roboflow Labs has three technical directives:

**We publish research and train our own open models** intended to be deployed at the edge in real world environments. We released [__RF-DETR__](https://rfdetr.roboflow.com/latest/?ref=blog.roboflow.com) under Apache 2.0, which achieved state-of-the-art for realtime object detection, segmentation, and pose estimation.

**We work with frontier labs** to evaluate and [__distribute their models__](https://x.com/AIatMeta/status/1991191530367799379?ref=blog.roboflow.com) via Roboflow and to create training data and environments across modalities and domains we have strong opinions about - vision, robotics, coding, media, enterprise, and more. We advance the model capabilities that drive the most value back to our customers.

**We partner with enterprises** to design evals & benchmarks like [__RF100-VL__](https://rf100-vl.org/?ref=blog.roboflow.com) where we see models still failing at real world commercial use cases. [__Roboflow Playground__](https://playground.roboflow.com/?ref=blog.roboflow.com), our home of [__public vision benchmarks__](https://playground.roboflow.com/evals?ref=blog.roboflow.com), has allowed our community to score models head-to-head on difficult tasks in detection, OCR, visual reasoning, and more.

Roboflow Labs is powered by millions of developers and [__domain experts__](https://nebula.roboflow.com/?ref=blog.roboflow.com) who have annotated billions of images and videos on our platform to deploy hundreds of thousands of models in the real world. 

Roboflow is on a mission to make the world programmable and our core business is exploding with real staying power as AI traverses the physical economy. We are supported by great enterprise partners like [__NVIDIA__](https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/factory-operations-fox-blueprint-ai-brain/?ref=blog.roboflow.com), Rivian, and Standard Bots and backed by top investors including Google Ventures, Craft Ventures, Jeff Dean, Lachy Groom, Y Combinator, and more.

We’re a team of former founders, scientists, and zero-to-one operators and are [__hiring__](https://labs.roboflow.com/careers?ref=blog.roboflow.com) across research, engineering, operations, and growth in downtown San Francisco. 

*Get in touch: labs@roboflow.com*

### **Cite this Post**

Use the following entry to cite this post in your research:

[Jake Seaton](https://blog.roboflow.com/author/jake/). (Sep 30, 2026).
      Introducing Roboflow Labs: Advancing the Frontier of Real World Capabilities. Roboflow Blog: https://blog.roboflow.com/roboflow-labs-launch/