KEVIN GUO, 28

COFOUNDER, HIVE AI

To keep offensive images off their sites, companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter spend billions to hire tens of thousands of low-paid workers to censor foul or illegal content. It’s a tedious and taxing gig. “Humans shouldn’t do that job,” says Hive AI CEO Kevin Guo. “We’ve built solutions that can get rid of up to 99% of that work.” Hive, which Guo founded in 2013 with CTO Dmitriy Karpman, makes software to tag and flag millions of images and videos across social media and the Web. Guo is secretive about his U.S. clients, but Yubo, a French social video platform for teens, uses Hive to keep nasty content from its 20 million users. Hive has uses beyond screening. It can also search for images of celebrities, brands and products across millions of sources, giving companies analytics about where, when and how their assets are seen. Founders Fund, General Catalyst, 8VC and others have invested more than $50 million. Guo’s next feature: audio detection. —Ariel Shapiro, Hayley Cuccinello, Brett Knight