About CVAT
CVAT.ai develops CVAT, an open-source tool for annotating images, video, audio and 3D point clouds. It is built for vision and machine learning teams that prepare training data for AI models. It comes in three forms: free self-hosted software under an MIT license, a managed cloud service called CVAT Online, and CVAT Enterprise. The company also offers labeling services for computer vision and audio.
CVAT began at Intel in 2017, went open source on GitHub in 2018 and spun out as an independent company in 2022. Hundreds of thousands of teams use it, and it has been downloaded millions of times. The company has a U.S. office in Wilmington, Delaware, and an EU office in Paphos, Cyprus. Nikita Manovich is co-founder and chief executive officer, and Boris Sekachev is co-founder and chief technology officer.
Funding Rounds (SEC Form D)
| First sale | Filed with SEC | Amount sold | Investors | Avg. check | Terms | Filing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 20, 2026 | Oct 28, 2026 | $2,499,998of $5.4M target | 2 | $1.2M | EquityRule 506(b) | Form D ↗ |
First sale is the date the first investor in the offering committed to invest. Companies must file Form D within 15 days of that date, so filing dates run later.
Rounds announced by CVAT
What the company said publicly about its funding. Announced amounts can differ from Form D figures: an announcement can combine several closings, and some money is raised without a Form D.
| Announced | Round | Amount | Investors | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 27, 2026 | Investment | $2 million | OH.io Capital (lead) | Business Wire: OH.io Partners with CVAT to Accelerate Growth of the Open-Source Data Labeling Platform to Train AI at Scale ↗ Pulse 2: OH.io Invests $2 Million In CVAT ↗ |
Why Investors Backed CVAT
CVAT.ai builds software and offers services for labeling the image, video, audio and 3D data used to train AI. In October 2026, OH.io Capital invested $2 million in CVAT. Its sister company OH.io will also handle go-to-market work for CVAT.
The problem it targets
CVAT began as an Intel tool for computer vision engineers who needed to label training data. The team built it on VATIC, an open-source video annotation tool from Irvine, California. In the company's account, annotation held up computer vision work, and the tools on offer were closed, limited or hard to scale. The company also holds that labeled data underpins every AI system.
What the product does
Annotators work with bounding boxes, polygons, masks, keypoints and cuboids. The platform adds AI-assisted labeling, quality control and team collaboration. Data can stay in AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage or local file shares. Finished annotations export to 20 or more task-specific formats, including COCO, YOLO, Pascal VOC and KITTI. CVAT Enterprise adds security and SLAs for on-premises use.
Progress so far
Nikita Manovich is the original architect and lead developer of CVAT. He built its core engineering team and a global open-source community. Boris Sekachev was lead frontend developer during the Intel years and now oversees product and technical strategy. The code has been forked thousands of times and has more than 300 contributors on GitHub. Recent updates added native audio annotation, with a workspace that has waveform controls and interval region tags.
Who backs it
OH.io Capital, a sister company of OH.io, invested $2 million in CVAT. OH.io describes itself as a go-to-market performance venture firm. It takes on CVAT's go-to-market work, including attracting new users. A Columbus-based OH.io team will handle marketing, sales outreach and community programs.
How the market is moving
According to a CVAT blog post dated June 25, 2026, Microsoft announced it would retire Azure ML Data Labeling on September 30, 2026. The post tells engineering and data science teams to evaluate other annotation platforms. It also compares the Azure tool with CVAT.
We wrote this summary from public statements by CVAT and its investors. It is not investment advice.
Leadership Team
Executive officers and directors listed on CVAT's Form D filed Oct 28, 2026.
Sources
- SECCVAT.ai Corp filing history
- CompanyCVAT.ai: About
- CompanyCVAT Blog
- CompanyCVAT Blog: CVAT vs. Azure ML Data Labeling