Encord raises $60M for AI data infrastructure
Encord, a company focused on AI-native data infrastructure, has secured $60 million in a Series C funding round. The investment is intended to help the company scale its platform as demand for AI that interacts with the physical world increases.
- The Series C round was led by Wellington Management, with participation from new investors Bright Pixel and Isomer Capital, bringing Encord's total funding to $110 million. - Encord's platform is engineered to handle complex multimodal data streams essential for physical AI, including audio, video, sensor data, and 3D point clouds, which legacy data infrastructure was not designed to process. - In the last 18 months, the volume of data managed on Encord's platform has grown from one to over five petabytes, and revenue from its physical AI customers has increased tenfold. - The company was founded by Eric Landau and Ulrik Stig Hansen, who identified that machine learning teams were spending upwards of 80% of their time on data-related tasks like quality control and curation, rather than on developing model architecture. - "Physical AI" refers to systems that interact with the physical world, using sensors like cameras, LiDAR, and radar to perceive their environment and execute actions, as seen in autonomous vehicles and robotics. - The platform consolidates the AI development data lifecycle into a single system, covering data management, curation, annotation, and model evaluation to create a traceable audit trail for model behavior. - Encord's customer base of over 300 teams includes prominent companies in autonomous systems, such as Toyota's mobility subsidiary Woven, drone delivery company Zipline, and drone manufacturer Skydio.
