Encord, a San Francisco-based AI data development platform for advanced vision and multimodal teams, has recently raised $30 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Next47 (which invested in Grafbase and Wayve) with participation from existing investors Y Combinator, CRV, and Crane Venture Partners.
What change does Encord bring?
Building successful AI models relies heavily on high-quality data. However, managing and curating large datasets is a major hurdle for AI teams. Traditional methods are slow, expensive, and often require significant manual supervision, hindering broader AI adoption. Encord makes AI data development easy with one platform that helps companies curate, manage, annotate, and evaluate AI data.
The team behind Encode
Founded by Ulrik Stig Hansen and Eric Landau, the team, which includes engineers, operatives, and creatives from some of the largest technology companies on the planet, PhDs, and world-class alumni from Tessian, Meta, DRW, Goldman Sachs, Twilio, Microsoft, J.P. Morgan, and more.
What does the company do?
Encord leverages automation to give AI teams everything they need to make large datasets AI-ready and get models to production faster. Its software addresses all four steps of turning data into AI: data management, curation, annotation, and model evaluation.
It makes AI development practical and fast by building a complete data-focused AI tooling and infrastructure stack focused on model evaluation and observability, annotation and workforce management tooling, and data curation and management software, to get AI models working in production fast.
By consolidating this entire workflow into one platform, companies have a trail that shows why a model is making certain decisions. This allows enterprises adopting AI to uncover weaknesses and easily determine the correct data that is needed to retrain the model for a better outcome. With a software-first approach, Encord easily scales with customers as their data volume and model output increase, addressing the limitations of other tools and purely human supervision.
Encord Index tool
In addition to this, the company is launching a new tool, Encord Index. It is an end-to-end data management tool that allows customers to visualise, search, sort, and control their internal data that will be used to train and create AI models.
Index integrates seamlessly with data storage such as AWS S3, GCP Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, and others to automate the process of curating the best data and removing uninformative or biased data. As a result, Encord customers have achieved a 35% reduction in dataset size by curating the best data, seeing upwards of 20% improvement in model performance, and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in compute and human annotation costs.
“We’re seeing a lot of innovation at the model and compute layers of AI but not as much innovation at the data layer,” said T.J. Rylander, General Partner of Next47. “Encord’s forward-thinking platform addresses one of the biggest challenges in AI today – understanding and managing the data that will give enterprises high quality, reliable outcomes from their AI applications, therefore lowering the risk of AI implementation. The market has long needed a solution for the AI data problem and we are proud to back Encord as the startup that has found it.”
“In 10 years, every company will have an AI department in the same way that they have an IT department today or risk losing relevance, and Encord will be the only platform they need to accomplish the process of turning data into functional AI models,” said Ulrik Stig Hansen, Co-Founder, and President of Encord. “As AI models begin tackling increasingly complex problems, the access to and management of data will only become more crucial. By leading with automation, we’ve built a scalable solution to support customers on every step of their AI journey.”
Userbase
Encord is trusted by over 120 of the top AI teams from organisations such as Synthesia, Philips, Zoopla, Cedars-Sinai, Northwell Health, and many more.
“Successful state-of-the-art models, like our recently released Expressive Avatar foundation model EXPRESS-1, require highly sophisticated infrastructure. Encord Index is a high-performance system for our AI data, enabling us to sort and search at any level of complexity. This supports our continuous efforts to push the boundaries of AI avatar technology and meet customer needs” said Victor Riparbelli, Co-Founder and CEO of Synthesia, the billion-dollar generative AI company.
