Ultralytics

Ultralytics is the company behind YOLO ("You Only Look Once"), the most widely adopted family of open-source, real-time computer-vision models. Founded in 2014 by Glenn Jocher and headquartered in Frederick, Maryland, the privately held company has built its reputation on making advanced computer vision easy to use — its open-source Python package and pretrained models are used by millions of developers, researchers, and enterprises worldwide.

Ultralytics maintains the modern YOLO lineage, including the popular YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 releases, YOLO11, and the YOLO26 generation introduced in 2026. A single YOLO model can perform object detection, instance segmentation, pose estimation, image classification, and oriented-box detection, and it is fast enough to run on live video — which is why YOLO has become a default choice for applications from manufacturing inspection and retail analytics to drones, robotics, and driver-assistance systems.

The company runs a dual-license business model that has become a template for commercial open source: the core models and tools are free under the AGPL-3.0 open-source license, while companies that want to embed YOLO in closed-source commercial products buy a paid enterprise license. Ultralytics also offers a managed platform, Ultralytics HUB, for training and deploying custom vision models without heavy infrastructure. Its mission — democratizing access to state-of-the-art vision AI — has made it one of the most influential names in applied computer vision, even as the field's largest research budgets sit at far bigger labs.