- Samasource, a leader in providing secure and high-quality training data for AI technologies, announced it raised $14.8 million in funding
Samasource — a leader in providing secure and high-quality training data for AI technologies — announced it has raised $14.8 million in Series A funding led by Ridge Ventures. Social Impact Ventures, Bestseller Foundation, and Bluecrest Limited Capital also joined the funding round.
“To receive the funding support of Ridge Ventures has allowed us to accelerate growth beyond our expectations,” said Leila Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource. “AI is growing at breakneck speed, and we know the biggest bottleneck is secure high-quality training data. Our emphasis on investments in technology and talent will deepen our level of service to AI teams at the world’s leading tech and automotive companies.”
This round of funding will be used to scale Samasource’s engineering, sales, and marketing efforts. And the funding round propels the breadth of Samasource’s technology with more advanced features in the current platform, including building upon current annotation automation capabilities that increase efficiency and quality, and more advanced integration with customer’s machine learning models via API.
And the funding round will also enable the company to further establish itself as a pioneer in the field of AI and training data and continue to deliver secure high-quality training data to 25% of Fortune 50 companies such as Microsoft, Walmart, and Continental.
Samasource also opened an AI Development Center in Montreal, Canada and a delivery center in Kampala, Uganda — which adds to its global presence in San Francisco, New York City, the Hague, Gulu, and Nairobi.
“One of the biggest drivers of AI model value is the quality of the labeling and tagging of the corpus of training data. While many in the industry use casual, untrained gig-economy labor with poor results, I was excited to see the quality, security and high throughput Samasource achieves for its clients,” said Ben Metcalfe, principal at Ridge Ventures. “It’s no surprise that so many leaders in the AI and Machine Learning space rely on the company for its best-in-class data labeling services to help build their world-changing models. As Samasource continues to combine software intelligence with their inspiring workforce, I’m honored to partner with them to bring forth the next AI-powered industrial revolution.”
And to further build out its engineering department, Frederic Ratle is joining the team in an inaugural position as head of AI research and development (R&D).
With these expansions, Samasource provides full-time employment to more than 2,900 people and it is one of the largest employers in East Africa. Plus Samasource has also recently entered partnerships with Mila — which is an organization that rallies researchers specializing in the field of deep learning and Partnership on AI.
With a combination of Samasource’s leading annotation platform and a skilled workforce, Samasource trains data for computer vision and NLP use cases and provides content services and data enrichment solutions. And companies utilize the trained data sets provided by Samasource to propel their AI technology forward in industries like automotive, consumer internet, e-commerce, robotics, biotech, AR/VR, etc.
