Datasaur snags $3.9M investment to build intelligent machine learning labeling platform

2020-09-30

As machine learning has grown, one of the major bottlenecks remains labeling things so the machine learning application understands the data it's working with. Datasaur, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch, announced a $3.9 million investment today to help solve that problem with a platform designed for machine learning labeling teams.
The funding announcement, which includes a pre-seed amount of $1.1 million from last year and $2.8 million seed right after it graduated from Y Combinator in March, included investments from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator and OpenAI CTO Greg Brockman.

Company founder Ivan Lee says that he has been working in various capacities involving AI for seven years. First when his mobile gaming startup Loki Studios was acquired by Yahoo! in 2013, and Lee was eventually moved to the AI team, and, most recently, at Apple. Regardless of the company, he consistently saw a problem around organizing machine learning labeling teams, one that he felt he was uniquely situated to solve because of his experience.

“I have spent millions of dollars [in budget over the years] and spent countless hours gathering labeled data for my engineers. I came to recognize that this was something that was a problem across all the companies that I’ve been at. And they were just consistently reinventing the wheel and the process. So instead of reinventing that for the third time at Apple,  my most recent company, I decided to solve it once and for all for the industry. And that’s why we started Datasaur  last year,”Lee told TechCrunch.

@ron_miller / 10:48 pm CST•September 29, 2020

https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/29/datasaur-snags-3-9m-investment-to-build-intelligent-machine-learning-labeling-platform/