Introducing Roboflow Labs: Advancing the Frontier of Real World Capabilities

Roboflow launched Roboflow Labs, a new applied research division focused on teaching models to see, reason, and act in three dimensions across industries, the company announced. Roboflow Labs will publish research and train open edge models, including RF-DETR, released under Apache 2.0 and achieving state-of-the-art results for realtime object detection, segmentation, and pose estimation, and will partner with frontier labs and enterprises on evals and benchmarks such as RF100-VL. Roboflow says millions of developers and over half of the Fortune 100 use its platform, which has been cited in over 13,000 research papers, and the company is hiring in San Francisco with backing from Google Ventures, Craft Ventures, Jeff Dean, Lachy Groom, and Y Combinator.

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/