Encord Secures $60M for Robotics Data Infrastructure
Encord, a startup providing data infrastructure for physical AI, has secured $60 million in funding. The company's platform helps manage data collection, annotation, and workflow automation for intelligent robots and drones. The investment will accelerate development in sectors such as defense, logistics, and industrial automation, where data management is critical for scaling autonomous systems from prototype to deployment.
The latest $60 million Series C funding round was led by Wellington Management. This brings Encord's total funding to $110 million and values the company at $550 million. Existing investors such as Y Combinator, CRV, and Crane Venture Partners also participated. Encord was founded in London in 2020 by co-CEOs Ulrik Stig Hansen and Eric Landau. They identified that machine learning teams were spending over 80% of their time on data preparation rather than model development. The company provides a unified platform to manage the entire data lifecycle for physical AI, from capturing and labeling to curation and evaluation, specifically for sensor-based data like video, LiDAR, and 3D point clouds. This funding addresses a critical bottleneck as AI moves from digital environments to physical applications like autonomous vehicles and robotics. Unlike large language models trained on internet data, physical AI requires massive amounts of proprietary, real-world sensor data, which legacy systems struggle to handle. Encord's platform is designed for this complexity, managing multimodal data streams at a petabyte scale. The company has seen significant growth, with the volume of data managed on its platform increasing from one to over five petabytes in the last year, while revenue from its physical AI clients grew tenfold. Current clients include prominent names like Woven by Toyota, the drone delivery company Zipline, and Skydio. The market for physical AI is projected to exceed $30 billion, with over 400 million AI-powered robots expected to be operational in the next four years. This growth highlights the increasing demand for specialized data infrastructure. Encord's direct competitors include Scale AI and Labelbox, but it differentiates itself with a focus on automation and a unified data layer for the sensor-heavy world of physical AI. In Turkey, the robotics and AI startup scene is also growing, with companies like Milvus Robotics, which develops autonomous mobile robots for warehouses, and Saha Robotik, focusing on delivery robots. Milvus Robotics, founded in 2011, has raised $5.1M to date. Another Istanbul-based startup, Robomotion, has raised $1.3M for its robotic process automation (RPA) platform.
