Niche Player: Clarifai

Clarifai is known for image services and has been a strong provider for many years.

The Wilmington, Delaware-based company’s cloud AI developer services offering and roadmap span language, vision and autoML use cases.

Although Clarifai grew significantly in terms of sales and partnerships in 2021, it is still a midstage startup and not yet profitable, Gartner said. The company ranks near the bottom of the pack for both vision and execution on the Magic Quadrant.

Strength: Clarifai invests more than half its revenue in research and development. Planned innovations in language services include zero-shot text classification, knowledge graph linking and speaker identification. The company also plans to develop distributed learning and federated learning capabilities for the autoML use case.

Weakness: Clarifai is a relatively small, venture-funded company that is competing with the cloud giants. Clarifai does not have personnel in all the regions where its customers are located.