ai-training-data
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micro1 Bet the AI Boom Would Run Out of Human Judgment
The young company began with an AI interviewer. It is now selling the scarce ingredient frontier models, workplace agents and robots all need: structured evidence of how capable people think and work.
Shofo
Shofo is a San Francisco startup (Y Combinator W26) building what it calls the world's largest indexed video library - a 'Common Crawl for video.' It continuously crawls billions of public short-form clips from platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, then runs them through a pipeline that sanitizes, deduplicates, segments and labels footage with object detection, activity recognition and reasoning annotations. Shofo sells custom, ready-to-train datasets to AI labs, delivering a request like '100K hours of cooking videos where someone is holding a pan' in days rather than months.
Integral Privacy Technologies
Integral is a privacy engineering company that turns sensitive real-world data - starting with HIPAA-regulated healthcare records - into compliant, AI-ready datasets. Founded in 2022 by Shubh Sinha and John Kuhn, it pairs automated de-identification and continuous risk assessment with embedded statisticians and privacy engineers (its Forward Deployed Privacy Services) so enterprises and AI labs can use regulated data quickly without violating privacy law. The company positions itself as an independent privacy layer for the real-world data economy and has raised roughly $24.9M to date, including an $18M Series A closed in July 2026.
Protege
Protege is a New York-based AI data platform that connects owners of private, real-world data - hospitals, media libraries, motion-capture studios and more - with the AI labs and enterprises that need it to train, fine-tune and evaluate models. It licenses and curates proprietary datasets under strict privacy, IP and compliance controls, so data holders get paid and provenance is preserved. Founded in 2024 by Bobby Samuels and Travis May, Protege has assembled access to billions of clinical notes, hundreds of millions of medical images, and hundreds of thousands of hours of video and audio, positioning itself as core infrastructure for the post-web era of AI development.
iMerit Technology
iMerit is a global AI data solutions company that supplies the labeled, enriched and expert-refined data used to train, fine-tune and evaluate machine learning and generative AI models. Founded in 2012 by Radha Basu, it pairs a specialized human workforce with its Ango Hub annotation platform and its Scholars network of domain experts to serve Fortune 500 clients across autonomous vehicles, healthcare, geospatial and financial services. In June 2026, enterprise-AI firm EXL agreed to acquire iMerit for up to $310 million.
Stardust AI
Stardust AI is a San Francisco-founded, data-centric AI company that helps enterprises turn raw, messy, multimodal data into the high-quality datasets that machine-learning models actually need. Through its Rosetta auto-labeling platform, its MorningStar data engine and its COSMO dataset offerings, Stardust annotates and manages 2D/3D/4D data spanning images, video, point clouds, audio and text - with heavy expertise in autonomous driving and large language models. The company works with names like SAIC Motor, BYD, Geely, Bosch, ZF, Xiaomi and JD.com, and pitches a simple thesis for the AI era: whoever controls the data controls the model.
Created by Humans
Created by Humans is a San Francisco startup building a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators sell the rights to their work for AI training, reference, and transformation - and get paid for it. Founded by former Scribd CEO Trip Adler, the platform lets rights holders claim their books (by ISBN or upload), set the terms under which AI companies may use them, and track usage and payments, positioning licensing as an alternative to lawsuits between creators and AI developers.
Pareto.AI
Pareto.AI is a San Francisco-based, talent-first human data platform that connects AI labs with a deeply vetted network of expert labelers to produce premium training data, RLHF, and evaluation signals. Founded by Thiel Fellow Phoebe Yao, the company started as a bootcamp for women and work-from-home mothers, pivoted into AI data labeling in 2023, and now positions itself as the 'verification layer' for reinforcement learning on real-world expertise, turning specialist judgment into durable reward signals under the banner 'Expert data for AGI.'
Bifrost AI
Bifrost AI builds simulation and evaluation infrastructure for physical AI. Its platform generates photorealistic 3D synthetic data and stress-tests robotics and computer-vision systems across thousands of simulated scenarios - weather, sensor noise, rare edge cases - so teams can train and validate models in minutes instead of months. Used across maritime, geospatial, aerial, off-road, industrial, and off-world domains, with collaborators including NASA JPL and the U.S. Air Force. Founded in 2020 and backed by an $8M Series A led by Carbide Ventures with participation from Airbus Ventures and Peak XV's Surge.
Dorian Pieracci
Dorian Pieracci is the Co-Founder and CEO of MOVRS, a Los Angeles sports-technology company that turns ordinary video into structured, labeled 3D data about how humans move. Founded in 2020, MOVRS builds AI-powered biomechanics and digital-twin tools for sports and entertainment partners, from baseball pitching analysis to immersive broadcast experiences. A Georgetown-trained sports industry executive and UC Berkeley graduate, Pieracci is a Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech accelerator alum who pivoted MOVRS from direct sales to a partner-led model and assembled a team drawn from MLB and major sports media.
Phoebe Yao
Phoebe Yao is the founder and CEO of Pareto.AI, a talent-first human data platform that recruits and trains the top sliver of expert labelers to produce high-quality training data for the world's leading AI labs. A Chinese-American immigrant, classical violist, 2020 Thiel Fellow and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, she dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build what began as a bootcamp training women as remote virtual assistants and pivoted in 2023 into the human-data backbone for AI research. Her companies have worked with the likes of Character.AI and Imbue and researchers at Stanford and UPenn, all anchored by a single conviction: the humans behind AI deserve to be treated as experts, not anonymous clickworkers.
Trip Adler
Trip Adler is a San Francisco tech founder who co-founded Scribd in 2007 and ran it for 16 years, building it into a reading platform used by roughly 100 million people. In 2024 he launched Created by Humans, a licensing marketplace that lets authors and other creators set terms and get paid when AI companies use their work to train and run models. His pitch is not to fight AI in court but to build the plumbing for a fair market between creators and the labs racing to license high-quality content.
Thoth AI
Thoth AI is a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company that builds the high-quality datasets, evaluation frameworks, and human-in-the-loop operations that production AI systems depend on. Spanning 200+ languages and 100+ countries, it handles data collection and annotation across images, video, 3D point cloud, text, and audio, along with RLHF, model evaluation, content moderation, and multilingual customer experience for teams building LLMs, VLMs, multimodal systems, and applied AI like robotics.
Wow AI
Wow AI is a US-registered, end-to-end AI training-data company that supplies high-quality, multilingual datasets and human-in-the-loop services - data collection, transcription, annotation, validation and RLHF - to teams building large language models, voice assistants and computer-vision systems. Its crowdsourcing network spans 170,000+ contributors across 120+ languages, with 100,000+ hours of audio and domain datasets for finance, healthcare and retail. The founding team has since extended the vision into AIxBlock, a decentralized platform for building, training and deploying AI, and WowDAO, a community-owned AI ecosystem.
LanceDB
LanceDB builds the data backbone for multimodal AI. Its open-source Lance columnar format and lakehouse let teams store, search, and train on text, images, video and embeddings in one system - replacing the brittle stack of Parquet files, vector stores and feature pipelines that AI teams usually stitch together. Used by Midjourney, Runway, Character.AI, WeRide and others, LanceDB raised a $30M Series A in 2025, bringing total funding to roughly $41M.
Centaur AI
Centaur AI (Centaur Labs) is a Boston-based healthcare data annotation platform that taps a network of 50,000+ vetted medical and scientific experts to label, evaluate, and monitor the multimodal data that powers medical AI. Born out of MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence, the company uses performance-weighted 'wisdom of the crowd' methods - delivered through its gamified DiagnosUs app - to produce labels that match or beat individual specialists, on a HIPAA-compliant, SOC 2 platform.
Mercor
Mercor is an AI-powered talent marketplace that recruits domain experts - doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists - to train and evaluate frontier AI models for labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Founded in 2023 by three Thiel Fellows, it has grown from a hiring tool into the human data backbone of the AI economy.
Adarsh Hiremath
Adarsh Hiremath is the Co-Founder and CTO of Mercor, the AI-powered talent marketplace connecting domain experts with AI labs for model training, evaluation, and data creation. At 22, he dropped out of Harvard, received a Thiel Fellowship, and co-built Mercor from a São Paulo hackathon idea into a $10 billion company generating over $500 million in annual revenue - making him one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires alongside co-founders Brendan Foody and Surya Midha.
Hovhannes Kuloghlyan
Hovhannes Kuloghlyan is a co-founder and Head of Operations at Wirestock, a San Francisco-based platform that sits at the intersection of the creator economy and AI data infrastructure. With a PhD in Cosmology from Yerevan Physics Institute and early career stints in blockchain development with Ripple, he transitioned into building one of the world's leading platforms for ethically sourced multimodal AI training data. Wirestock now serves over 700,000 creators globally and surpassed a $40M annual revenue run rate, closing a $23M Series A in May 2026. Kuloghlyan also chairs Grōksmith, a software design and development company with clients including PwC, the Ethereum Foundation, and UEFA.
Rukesh Reddy
Rukesh Reddy is the Founder and CEO of Deccan AI, a Mountain View-based AI data and post-training company that raised a $25M Series A in March 2026 led by A91 Partners with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. Built as a 'born GenAI' company in October 2024, Deccan AI serves frontier AI labs and major tech companies - including Google DeepMind and Snowflake - with high-precision training datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and enterprise evaluation suites. Reddy brings over 15 years of experience spanning finance, strategy consulting, and digital transformation at firms including J.P. Morgan, Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), and Citi, where he led CX and digital transformation for the global retail bank.
Wirestock
Wirestock is a two-sided marketplace that connects 700,000+ photographers, videographers, illustrators, and 3D artists with AI labs that need ethically-sourced, high-quality multimodal training data. After pivoting from stock-content distribution in 2023, the company now supplies six of the largest foundation-model makers and is running at a $40M revenue run rate.
Spencer Mateega
Spencer Mateega is the 23-year-old Co-Founder and CEO of AfterQuery, a San Francisco-based applied research lab that captures expert professional knowledge and converts it into high-quality training data for AI foundation models. Founded in January 2025 and backed by Y Combinator's Winter 2025 cohort, AfterQuery raised a $30 million Series A at a $300 million valuation in April 2026, with revenues exceeding $100 million annualized. Mateega's philosophy — 'We teach machines how experts think' — drives a platform connecting roughly 100,000 domain professionals in finance, legal, and software to frontier AI labs hungry for reasoning-rich data.
Surge AI
Surge AI is a San Francisco data annotation company that produces high-quality human-labeled datasets and RLHF feedback for the world's leading AI labs - OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta and Microsoft among them. Founded in 2020 by ex-Twitter and ex-Facebook ML engineer Edwin Chen, it bootstrapped to roughly $1.2B in annual revenue with around 110 employees and a labeler network reported near one million.
Eric Zhang
Eric Zhang is the Chief Executive Officer of Thoth AI, a Singapore-headquartered global AI data solutions company with R&D operations in Silicon Valley. Under his leadership, Thoth AI powers frontier AI models for some of the world's leading AI labs by providing high-quality training data, RLHF workflows, model evaluation, and multilingual customer experience services across 170+ countries in 200+ languages. Zhang operates at the intersection of AI safety, responsible deployment, and global scale - building the human infrastructure that makes AI smarter, safer, and culturally aware.