Snorkel AI Partners with Microsoft to Unlock the Potential of Enterprise AI

SAN FRANCISCO, April 4, 2023 — Snorkel AI announced today it is integrating Microsoft Azure AI services to speed AI development for Azure customers. In addition, Snorkel AI has joined the Microsoft for Startups program.

The company’s flagship programmatic labeling platform Snorkel Flow now includes integration with Azure AI services to help data science and machine learning teams seamlessly develop models tailored to their proprietary data and custom objectives. Teams can operationalize PDF data for training set creation and model training—including OCR, layout parsing, and more—by using Azure Form Recognizer directly from Snorkel Flow. Snorkel AI empowers Microsoft Azure customers to scale automation to the “iceberg under the surface” of valuable but unstructured enterprise data.

Data science teams can then efficiently collaborate with internal experts to programmatically label complex, highly variable, often proprietary enterprise data and quickly generate high-quality training sets. Newly labeled datasets can be used to train powerful Azure Form Recognizer neural network models directly from the Snorkel Flow user interface, while performance analysis can be auto-generated over custom Azure Form Recognizer models to guide next steps.

Snorkel AI’s inclusion in Microsoft for Startups reflects the company’s proven innovation in data-centric AI development and real-world impact across enterprises in every industry. Snorkel AI will benefit from access to Microsoft’s technology, market ecosystem, and business support. The program will not only enable Snorkel AI to accelerate ML Ops workflows with seamless integrations to Microsoft and Azure services but to leverage Microsoft’s network and advanced tools and platforms.

“We launched Snorkel AI to bring a data-centric approach to AI development everywhere, and make it practical for enterprises to build ML solutions for their most unique, highest value problems,” Alex Ratner, co-founder and CEO at Snorkel AI. “We’re helping Microsoft Azure customers build models even faster by making it easy to deploy Snorkel Flow on Azure, train and serve models with Azure Machine Learning, and integrate directly with Azure AI services. We are honored to be chosen for Microsoft for Startups and to benefit from Microsoft’s experience, technology, reputation, and global customer base. Together, we will help more organizations realize the full potential of AI.”

“Shipping production AI models that meet enterprise accuracy, auditability, and governance requirements is incredibly hard,” said Tom Davis, Sr. Director at Microsoft for Startups. “Snorkel AI addresses the challenges that many organizations encounter in the last mile of AI development, enabling enterprises to realize real, material value from their AI initiatives. Our goal is to support startups like Snorkel AI helping them connect their innovative solutions to the needs of our joint customers, through the power of Azure.”

Snorkel AI also recently announced that all of its customers have access to the Snorkel Flow Foundation Model Suite. This new set of capabilities enables enterprises to use programmatic labeling to fine-tune and adapt OpenAI’s powerful language models and other foundation models or automatically label data and train smaller, specialized deployable models.

Learn more about the Snorkel Flow Spring 2023 release roundup here.

A demo of how Snorkel Flow can be used to train custom Azure Form Recognizer models is available here.

About Snorkel AI

Founded by a team spun out of the Stanford AI Lab, Snorkel AI makes AI application development fast and practical by unlocking the power of machine learning without the bottleneck of manually-labeled training data. Snorkel Flow is the first data-centric AI platform powered by programmatic labeling. Backed by Addition, Greylock, GV, In-Q-Tel, Lightspeed Venture Partners and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, the company is based in Palo Alto.

Source: Snorkel AI