Datacurve, a Y Combinator graduate, announced on Thursday that it has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round. This new investment will be used to scale out the company’s unique data-centric approach to high-quality data collection for software training and development. Chemistry’s Mark Goldberg led the funding round. Staffers from prominent companies such as DeepMind, Vercel, Anthropic, and OpenAI all participated.
Datacurve was co-founded by Serena Ge and Charley Lee. They developed a novel “bounty hunter” system to incentivize talented software engineers to improve data collection efforts. This approach has already helped the company to funnel more than $1 million in bounties to independent contributors. With the rapidly intensifying competition in the AI and ML space, this is what makes Datacurve truly unique. In doing so, they approach data collection like it’s a consumer product rather than just a lab data labeling enterprise.
The company’s research and development activities are rooted in building targeted, sophisticated data via high-fidelity reinforcement learning (RL) environments. This participatory method improves the quality of the assessed data. Furthermore, it enriches Datacurve’s advantages in various disciplines ranging from finance, marketing and medicine.
Serena Ge articulated the company’s philosophy, stating, “We treat this as a consumer product, not a data labeling operation.” She further elaborated on the innovative framework being built by saying, “What we’re doing right now is we’re creating an infrastructure for post training data collection that attracts and retains highly competent people in their own domains.“
Datacurve raised $2.7 million in a pre-Series A seed round that proved successful. This push attracted investments from ex-Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan. This initial financial support provided the perfect launching pad for Datacurve’s impressive growth over the past few years in the highly competitive tech ecosystem.
As a very early-stage company, Datacurve believes deeply in software engineering principles. Along the way, it looks at how its model could be adapted for use in other sectors. The new funding will significantly bolster its capacity. Most importantly, it will strengthen the USGS mission to deliver world-class data solutions vital for sustainable software development.