Encord has raised a $30M Series B round for its data development platform

Encore, the startup behind a leading multimodal AI data development platform and Y Combinator’s winter 2021 batch participant, recently shared it has secured $30 million in a Series B funding round led by Next47, and supported by existing investors including CRV, Crane Venture Partners, and Y Combinator. This milestone makes Encord the youngest Y Combinator alum to raise a Series B round.

According to the startup, innovation in the data layer of the AI stack is not taking place as fast as it should because it is often overlooked in favor of the compute and models stacks, even though data is critical to building AI applications. To address this, Encord aims to help its users create high-quality training, fine-tuning, and validation data. To do this, the startup has broken down the data creation process into its most elementary steps. It now aims to develop top-class solutions for each process stage: data management & curation, annotation, and model evaluation.

Encord will leverage the new funding to accelerate its product roadmap. The startup recently launched Encord Index, an end-to-end data management platform for teams to visualize, search, sort, and manage internal data efficiently, regardless of size. Encord Index empowers users to preserve control and governance over their data and integrates with popular cloud providers, including AWS S3, GCP Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob, to automate data curation. Index has enabled up to 35% size reductions in customers' datasets while reaping performance improvements of over 20%.

CEO Eric Landau highlighted the company's commitment to innovation, integrating cutting-edge AI models into their platform and continuously expanding their feature set. As AI continues to reshape industries, Encord aims to play a key role in the ongoing AI revolution by focusing on the crucial aspect of data development.