What Moondream does

Moondream, operating under legal entity M87 Labs, Inc., builds a family of small, production-grade vision language models and a complete deployment stack around them. The model line includes Moondream 3 Preview (a 9B-parameter sparse mixture-of-experts model with 2B active parameters and a 32K context window), Moondream 2 (a 2B dense workhorse with 5M+ monthly Hugging Face downloads), and Moondream 2 0.5B (a 500M-parameter distillation target for edge deployment). Native grounded skills (Detect, Point, Segment, Caption, Query) output structured spatial data — bounding boxes, coordinates, and SVG masks — rather than text descriptions.

The company surrounds its models with a vertically integrated platform: Lens for hosted fine-tuning via SFT and RL with as few as 20 labeled images, Photon as a proprietary inference engine reported ~2x faster than vLLM (34ms end-to-end on B200, with support for Apple Silicon, Windows, Jetson, and NVIDIA hardware from L4 to B200), Moondream Cloud as a HIPAA-compliant OpenAI-compatible hosted API at $0.30/$2.50 per 1M input/output tokens, and Moondream Station as a one-click desktop installer. Open weights are distributed freely on Hugging Face under a commercial-friendly license.

Monetization combines freemium open models with usage-based Cloud and Lens inference, a $350/month Team plan (10 seats, shared fine-tunes, dedicated Slack), and custom Enterprise contracts with HIPAA/BAA, SOC 2 in progress, and priority support. GTM is product-led and developer-centric via GitHub, Hugging Face, Discord, and documentation, supplemented by direct enterprise outreach. Named customers include PTZOptics (broadcast cameras) and CalPoly (academic research), with broader go-to-market targeted at developers, manufacturing and industrial, media and broadcasting, healthcare, retail, and security segments. Founded in 2024 by Jay (CEO) and Vik (CTO), both former AWS engineers with 8+ years of collaboration, the company has raised $4.5M in seed funding from Felicis Ventures, M12 (GitHub-Microsoft), and Ascend.

Name

Moondream

Legal name

M87 Labs, Inc.

Website

https://moondream.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2024

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Moondream builds small, production-grade open vision language models and a vertically integrated platform (Lens fine-tuning, Photon inference engine, Moondream Cloud API, Station desktop client) that targets developers, manufacturing, media/broadcast, healthcare, retail, and security teams needing fast, low-cost, real-time vision AI from edge to cloud.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Vision Language Models

NAICS

Software Publishers (51321), Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (518210)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

Foundation Model Developers (LLM/Multimodal Model Labs) (HDAAACAA)

akta.pro secondary industry

On-Device Inference Runtimes & SDKs (mobile/embedded) (HDAAAJAB)

Keywords

• Vision language models
• Open source AI
• Computer vision APIs
• Edge AI inference
• Model fine-tuning

Headquarters

HQ city

Seattle

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Infrastructure, Marketing or Sales, Operations

Revenue model

1. Moondream Cloud (Hosted Inference): Pay-per-token hosted inference. Real-time: $0.30/1M input tokens, $2.50/1M output tokens. Batch: $0.15/1M input, $1.25/1M output. Supports auto-scaling, HIPAA compliance, and OpenAI-compatible API.
2. Lens Fine-tuning: Token-based fine-tuning service. Training: $0.60/1M training tokens. Inference pricing same as Cloud.
3. Team Plan: $350/month (or $300/mo billed annually). Includes 10 seats, shared fine-tunes, shared projects, shared API keys, shared billing, dedicated Slack, and 1h/month consulting.
4. Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing with custom seats, HIPAA/BAA available, security review, priority support, custom deployment support, and custom billing.
5. Photon Inference Engine: Free for local inference as of v1.3.0 (June 2026). Previously a paid product. Now completely free for self-hosted deployment.
6. Open Models: Free open weights available on Hugging Face. Commercial-friendly licensing. No revenue directly generated but drives adoption and Cloud upsell.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels5 records

Marketing channels7 records

Core offering

Moondream (built by M87 Labs) develops and distributes a family of compact, open-weight vision language models (VLMs) including Moondream 3 Preview (9B MoE), Moondream 2 (2B dense), and Moondream 2 0.5B. The company sells a complete production stack around these models: the Photon high-performance inference engine, the Lens hosted fine-tuning service, Moondream Cloud hosted inference API, and the Moondream Station desktop client. Core revenue comes from pay-per-token cloud inference, token-based fine-tuning, and Team/Enterprise subscriptions with collaboration and support features.

Product overview

Moondream is a production vision language model platform built by M87 Labs, comprising a family of open-weight VLMs (Moondream 3 Preview, Moondream 2, Moondream 0.5B) and a complete production stack including Lens fine-tuning service, Photon inference engine, Moondream Cloud hosted API, and Moondream Station desktop client. The platform is designed for real-time vision AI with models that run everywhere from cloud servers to edge devices, offering built-in grounded skills for detection, captioning, query, pointing, and segmentation.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Moondream 3 Preview
• Moondream 2

Quantifiable outcome

• F1 score improved from 0.28 to 0.79 for player with ball detection in NBA broadcasts (SFT fine-tuning)
• +7 more outcomes

Named customers2 records

Segments6 records

Ideal customer profiles2 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability7 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• PTZOpticscoreTechnology or Integration · 19 February 2026PTZOptics partnered with Moondream for visual reasoning initiative combining robotic PTZ camera systems with AI. Moondream's vision language model enables cameras to interpret what they see and trigger automated actions such as auto-tracking, smarter search, and real-time event-driven workflows. Supported by additional partners Axle AI, Detect-It, and LayerJot demonstrating visual AI applications.

Scale indicators10 records

Recent moves7 records

Expansion highlights7 records

Direct peers

• LLaVA / LLaVA-Next: LLaVA is an open-source vision-language model from academic labs (originally Microsoft Research + UW) with permissive licensing. It is the closest direct peer to Moondream as an open-weight VLM competing on similar benchmarks and developer mindshare.
• Qwen-VL (Alibaba): Qwen-VL is Alibaba's open-weight multimodal LLM family with strong vision-language benchmarks and permissive Apache licensing. Direct competitor to Moondream in the open-source VLM category targeting developers and production deployments.
• InternVL: InternVL is an open-source vision-language model family from Shanghai AI Lab that has achieved state-of-the-art results on multiple multimodal benchmarks. Direct peer competing in open-weight VLMs with comparable model sizes and developer adoption.
• Pixtral (Mistral AI): Pixtral is Mistral AI's open-weight vision-language model with permissive Apache 2.0 licensing. Direct peer to Moondream as a production-grade open VLM from a well-funded AI lab targeting developers and enterprise customers.

Broad incumbents

• OpenAI (GPT-4o / GPT-5): OpenAI is the broadest incumbent in vision-language AI with GPT-4o and GPT-5 offering multimodal capabilities via API. Moondream's Cloud product directly competes for the same use cases, and OpenAI's API is the standard Moondream's API emulates.
• Anthropic (Claude with vision): Anthropic offers Claude with vision capabilities as part of its broader frontier LLM platform. Broad incumbent competing with Moondream for enterprise vision AI workloads where accuracy and reasoning quality matter more than cost.
• Google (Gemini Vision): Google's Gemini multimodal models are a broad incumbent offering vision-language capabilities as part of a wider AI platform, competing with Moondream for both developer adoption (via API) and enterprise vision AI workloads.

Emerging players

• Landing AI (LandingLens): Landing AI is an Andrew Ng-led computer vision platform focused on industrial manufacturing and quality control use cases. Comparable to Moondream's manufacturing segment and fine-tuning approach, though specializing more narrowly in industrial inspection.
• Roboflow: Roboflow provides computer vision tooling including model training, inference, and deployment infrastructure. Adjacent to Moondream's Lens fine-tuning and Photon inference engine offerings, targeting similar developer and enterprise vision AI workflows.
• Ultralytics: Ultralytics builds YOLO models and the Ultralytics HUB platform for training, deploying, and serving computer vision models. Comparable to Moondream in providing production vision model infrastructure with a developer-focused open-source ecosystem.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks7 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• GitHubgithub.com/m87-labs/moondream
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/moondream-ai

Compliance2 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds1 record

Investors3 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Moondream