This archive report was first published on 21 November 2019.
On November 21, 2019, Samasource announced that it had secured $14.8 million in Series A funding to fuel its growth and expansion plans.
The funding round was led by Ridge Ventures, Social Impact Ventures, Bestseller Foundation, and Bluecrest Limited Capital, with the latter also joining the round.
Samasource, which employs over 2,900 people, plans to use the funding to further establish itself as a pioneer in the field of AI and training data. The company will continue to deliver secure, high-quality training data to its Fortune 50 clients, including Microsoft, Walmart, and Continental.
"One of the biggest drivers of AI model value is the quality of the labeling and tagging of the corpus of training data," 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 part of its expansion plans, Samasource has opened an AI Development Center in Montreal, Canada, and a delivery center in Kampala, Uganda, adding to its existing operations in San Francisco, New York City, the Hague, Gulu, and Nairobi.
The company has also partnered with Mila, an organization that rallies researchers specializing in deep learning, and Partnership on AI, a multi-stakeholder consortium focused on establishing best practices for AI systems.
"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."
With this funding and partnerships, companies will be able to utilize the trained data sets provided by Samasource to propel their AI technology forward in industries such as automotive, consumer internet, e-commerce, robotics, biotech, AR/VR, and more.
