Datacurve raises $15 million to tackle Scale AI

As AI corporations mature, the battle for high-quality information has change into probably the most aggressive areas within the trade, launching corporations like Mercor, Surge, and, most prominently, Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI. However now that Wang has moved on to run AI at Meta, many funders see a gap — and are prepared to fund corporations with compelling new methods for amassing coaching information.

The Y Combinator graduate Datacurve is one such firm, specializing in high-quality information for software program growth. On Thursday, the corporate introduced a $15 million Sequence A spherical, led by Mark Goldberg at Chemistry with participation from workers at DeepMind, Vercel, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The Sequence A comes after a $2.7 million seed spherical, which drew funding from former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

Datacurve makes use of a “bounty hunter” system to draw expert software program engineers to finish the hardest-to-source datasets. The corporate pays for these contributions, distributing over $1 million in bounties thus far.

However co-founder Serena Ge (pictured above with co-founder Charley Lee) says the largest motivation isn’t monetary. For prime-value companies like software program growth, the pay will at all times be far decrease for information work than typical employment — so the corporate’s most necessary edge is a optimistic consumer expertise.

“We deal with this as a client product, not an information labeling operation,” Ge stated. “We spend a variety of time occupied with: How can we optimize it in order that the individuals we wish have an interest and get onto our platform?”

That’s significantly necessary because the wants of post-training information develop extra advanced. Whereas earlier fashions had been educated on easy datasets, at the moment’s AI merchandise depend on advanced RL environments, which should be constructed by way of particular and strategic information assortment. Because the environments develop extra subtle, the information necessities change into each extra intense for each amount and high quality — an element that would give high-quality information assortment corporations like Datacurve an edge.

As an early-stage firm, Datacurve is concentrated on software program engineering, however Ge says the mannequin may apply simply as simply to fields like finance, advertising, and even medication.

“What we’re doing proper now could be we’re creating an infrastructure for post-training information assortment that pulls and retains extremely competent individuals in their very own domains,” Ge says.