Encord Raises $60M for 'Physical AI' Data Infrastructure
Encord, a data infrastructure platform for computer vision and multimodal AI, has secured $60 million in a Series C funding round led by Wellington Management. The company states the funding will be used to scale its platform as "physical AI," including robotics and autonomous systems, reaches an inflection point. The new round brings Encord's total financing to $110 million.
Physical AI refers to intelligent systems that can perceive, reason, and interact with the real world through robotics and other autonomous machines. Unlike digital AI trained on internet text and images, these systems learn from complex, proprietary sensor data like video, LiDAR, and audio feeds to operate in dynamic physical environments. Founded by co-CEOs Eric Landau and Ulrik Stig Hansen, Encord tackles the primary bottleneck they observed in the industry: AI teams spending over 80% of their time managing data instead of building models. The platform provides a unified layer for curating, annotating, and evaluating these massive, multimodal datasets at a petabyte scale. The company's focus on physical AI has driven a tenfold increase in revenue from these customers over the past year. Data volume on its platform has quintupled to over 5 petabytes, and its client roster includes major players in autonomous systems like Woven by Toyota, drone delivery service Zipline, and robotics company Skydio. This latest funding round brings Encord's valuation to $550 million. The round saw participation from existing investors such as Y Combinator, CRV, and N47, signaling strong continued belief in the company's specialized approach compared to more generalized competitors like Scale AI or Labelbox.
