Rapidata announced it has raised an $8.5 million seed round to accelerate AI development by scaling on-demand human feedback for model training and evaluation. The round was co-led by Canaan Partners and IA Ventures, with participation from Acequia Capital and BlueYard Capital.
The funding will be used to expand Rapidata’s global human data network and support rising demand from AI companies seeking faster and more reliable feedback loops.
Rapidata positions itself as addressing one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks: the slow, manual collection of large-scale human feedback required for training and improving models, including reinforcement learning from human feedback workflows. While computing power and model architectures have advanced rapidly, gathering high-quality human judgments, preferences, and validation data remains operationally complex and time-consuming, often stretching feedback cycles into weeks or months.
The company’s platform enables AI teams to request targeted human feedback on demand, distributing short, opt-in tasks through widely used consumer applications. This approach allows Rapidata to reach a global audience daily and generate large volumes of feedback without requiring companies to manage static annotation workforces or custom labeling operations. According to the company, feedback cycles that once took months can now be completed in days or even within a single day.
Rapidata integrates directly into existing AI development workflows and builds respondent trust and expertise profiles over time, matching questions to relevant participants to improve data quality at scale. The company says compressing feedback timelines allows AI teams to iterate faster, validate models in real-world contexts and bring products to market more quickly in an increasingly competitive landscape.
KEY QUOTES:
“Human feedback has become the limiting factor in AI progress. Rapidata removes that ceiling by making human judgment available at a global scale and near real time, unlocking a future where AI teams can run constant feedback loops and build systems that evolve every day instead of every release cycle. At this speed of iteration, entirely new AI innovation becomes possible.”
Rapidata Company Statement
