Polarr raises $11.5 million for offline, on-device computational photography

Polarr, a six-year-old San Jose computer vision startup cofounded by Stanford graduate and Google veterans Borui Wang and Derek Yan, today announced that it has secured $11.5 million in series A funding led by Threshold Ventures, with participation from Cota Capital and Pear Ventures. Wang said the fresh capital -- which brings its total raised to $13.5 million, according to Crunchbase -- will be used to accelerate research and development; expand platform and service support; and grow its technology partnerships in drone, home appliance, ecommerce, and image storage verticals. "As deep learning compute shifts from the cloud to edge devices, there is a growing opportunity to provide sophisticated and creative edge AI technologies to mobile devices," said Wang, who serves as CEO. "This new round of financing is a tangible endorsement of our approach to enable and inspire everyone to make beautiful creations." Threshold Ventures' Chris Kelley and Pear Ventures' Mar Hershenson will join Polarr's board of directors as part of the round.