AI Data Startup Encord Raises $60M
Encord, a startup focused on AI-native data infrastructure, has raised a $60M Series C. The company cited massive customer data growth from one to five petabytes and a tenfold revenue jump. The funding highlights investor appetite for platforms that manage data annotation, quality, and observability specifically for building AI applications.
The latest funding round was led by Wellington Management, bringing Encord's total capital raised to $110 million and pushing its valuation to $550M. Existing investors, including Y Combinator and CRV, also participated, signaling strong continued support for the company's direction. Encord was founded by co-CEOs Ulrik Stig Hansen and Eric Landau, who observed that machine learning teams spent upwards of 80% of their time on data preparation rather than model development. Their platform is built to address this bottleneck, focusing specifically on the complex, multimodal data required for "physical AI," which includes sensor, video, audio, and LiDAR data used in autonomous vehicles and robotics. The company's client roster includes over 300 teams, with prominent names like Woven by Toyota, Zipline, and Skydio using the platform to manage the full data lifecycle. This involves everything from data ingestion and curation to annotation and model evaluation, handling petabyte-scale workloads on a cloud-native architecture. For industries with stringent data requirements, the platform is SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant. A core
