Snorkel AI, a data-centric AI platform company powered by programmatic data labeling, announced it has received $85 million in Series C funding, bringing the total funding raised to $135 million, enabling the company to bring the transformative impact of data-centric AI to more enterprises around the world.
Snorkel AI is now valued at $1 billion, making it one of the few companies in the AI industry to reach a billion-dollar valuation in two years. The new round was co-led by Addition, a new investor in Snorkel AI, and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, a previous investor. Other previous investors Greylock, GV, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nepenthe Capital and Walden also participated.
The funding will also go toward scaling its world-class engineering team, which includes engineers from Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia, so that it can continue to aggressively innovate for customers around the world, as well as its go-to-market team to drive successful AI adoption.
Snorkel AI, founded in 2019 by a team spun out of the Stanford AI Lab, is leading the shift in focus of AI practitioners from model-centric to a data-centric approach.
Snorkel AI enables organisations to build AI applications with programmatic data labeling, eliminating the need to hand label data which is notoriously expensive and inefficient. Among Snorkel AI’s customers are some of the world’s biggest brands including Fortune 50 companies as well as US government agencies.
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The company’s flagship product, Snorkel Flow, is a data-centric AI platform that makes it feasible for data scientists and non-technical experts to build applications by programmatically labeling the data.
In Snorkel Flow, users can label and manage data using code, train models and identify model error modes to iteratively improve them in a rapid, data-centric workflow, using both SDK and no-code interfaces. This shortens the development cycle and improves application quality significantly while being able to manage bias or any deterioration in production performance.
With Snorkel Flow, organisations have achieved state-of-the-art machine learning model accuracy and reduced development time to days as opposed to months, according to the vendor.
“We’re incredibly excited by the value Snorkel Flow has driven for our enterprise customers by enabling them to adopt a programmatic, data-centric approach to AI, taking projects previously blocked on the data to production value in days. This new Series C funding will enable us to accelerate the pace of our product development even further and to bring Snorkel Flow to even more domains and use cases,” said Alex Ratner, co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI.
