Reflex Robotics builds a wheeled, general-purpose humanoid that does real work on warehouse floors. Founded by MIT alumni with hardware chops from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Anduril and Oculus, the company designs and ships affordable humanoids that start with a human-in-the-loop and learn their way to autonomy. Their robots are deployed in pilots with GXO and other Fortune 100 logistics operators, with a manufacturing footprint planned in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
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.
NEWWORK Software is an enterprise AI company building the Digital Workforce Platform - a new category of enterprise software that lets organizations create, deploy, govern and scale teams of AI-powered 'digital employees' that work alongside human staff. Founded in 2023 in Palo Alto by former SAP and Workday leaders, NEWWORK pairs an AI-native ERP and a FLOW automation engine with an Agent Operating System, role-based controls, approval workflows and audit trails so autonomous agents can execute real business work safely across HR, finance, CRM and service operations.
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.
CopilotKit is an open-source company building the interface layer between humans and AI agents. Its SDK and the open AG-UI protocol let developers embed agents directly inside apps - rendering interactive UI, sharing state, and supporting human-in-the-loop workflows - instead of bolting on a text-only chatbot. Founded in 2023 by brothers Atai and Uli Barkai and headquartered in the Seattle area, the company raised a $27M Series A in May 2026 and counts Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Oracle, and a large share of the Fortune 500 among adopters of its protocol.
Duckbill is a Boston-based service that combines AI with trained human assistants - called copilots - to take the dreaded everyday tasks and endless life admin off your plate. Members hand off to-dos like disputing a bill, booking appointments, researching long-term care, or planning a party via text, email, app, voice memo, or chat, and a copilot, supported by AI, researches and executes them. Founded in 2022 by Meghan Joyce and Emi Gonzalez, the company raised a $24.75M Series A in 2023 led by Forerunner Ventures.
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.
Meghan Verena Joyce is the co-founder and CEO of Duckbill, a Boston startup that pairs AI with human experts to act as an executive assistant for your personal life - booking appointments, filing claims, and clearing the to-do list. Before founding Duckbill in 2022, she ran Uber's biggest East Coast markets, served as COO and EVP of Platform at Oscar Health, and advised the U.S. Treasury during the recession. She has raised $33 million for Duckbill, led by Forerunner Ventures, and sits on the boards of The Boston Beer Company and Guardant Health.
TrustLab is a San Mateo-based trust and safety software company building AI-with-human-in-the-loop tools that detect, evaluate, and enforce against harmful online content - from misinformation and hate speech to identity fraud. Founded in 2020 by former trust and safety leaders from Google, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit, it sells content-safety and AI-oversight products (DetectAI, ModAI, SuperviseAI) to social platforms, marketplaces, and governments, and was selected by the European Commission to independently measure disinformation across major platforms under its Code of Practice.
Centific is a Redmond, Washington-based AI and data company that calls itself the hidden infrastructure behind world-class AI models. Its AI Data Foundry combines a global network of 1.8 million-plus domain experts with platforms for data collection, annotation, RLHF, model evaluation, governance and multimodal orchestration, helping enterprises and frontier model labs move AI from experimentation to production. Founded in 2020 out of the former Pactera EDGE business, Centific is a recognized NVIDIA innovation partner and raised a $60M Series A led by Granite Asia in June 2025.
Pienso is a no-code AI platform that lets domain experts - not just engineers - train, fine-tune, and deploy their own machine learning and large language models without writing a single line of code. Founded by MIT Media Lab alumni Birago Jones and Karthik Dinakar, Pienso keeps humans in the loop and data in the customer's control, with cloud or on-premise deployment for governments, media companies, and regulated enterprises.
Rev is an American speech-to-text company that pairs the world's most accurate AI speech recognition with a global network of human transcriptionists to deliver transcription, captions, and subtitles at up to 99% accuracy. Founded in 2010 by six MIT-connected entrepreneurs, Rev serves over 100,000 customers and more than a million users across legal, media, education, and enterprise, and has increasingly focused its AI on the legal market with tools for depositions, evidence, and case prep.
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.
Deccan AI is a Mountain View-based GenAI data company that runs the post-training and production layer for frontier labs and enterprises. It builds super-accurate SFT and RLHF datasets, reinforcement learning environments and agentic evaluation pipelines using an elite expert network and a purpose-built quality platform.
Labelbox is a San Francisco-based AI data factory that helps frontier AI labs and enterprises generate, label, and evaluate the high-quality training data their models need. Its platform combines annotation tools, model-assisted automation, and a global expert network (Alignerr) to power post-training, RLHF, and multimodal reasoning workloads.
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.
Sama is a San Francisco-based AI training-data company that combines a 5,000-plus full-time annotation workforce - most based in Kenya, Uganda and India - with proprietary tooling to deliver labeled data, model evaluation and red-teaming for the world's largest AI builders. Founded as the nonprofit Samasource in 2008 by the late Leila Janah, it relaunched as a for-profit B Corp in 2019 and counts Google, Walmart, NVIDIA, Ford and Microsoft among its customers.
Summer Weisberg is the CEO of Testlio, an AI-powered managed crowdsourced testing platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California. Appointed to the role in February 2026 after serving as COO and Interim CEO, she brings over 15 years of experience spanning software engineering, enterprise testing, professional services, and customer success. Before Testlio, she held senior roles at CloudBees, CA Technologies, FedEx, and Silicon Graphics. An advocate for diversity in tech and a sharp critic of AI-for-AI's-sake, she champions human judgment in quality engineering - insisting that AI without a solid quality foundation just makes mistakes faster.
Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama, a mission-driven AI data annotation and model evaluation company that employs thousands of workers in East Africa. She joined Sama in 2015, rose through the ranks as COO and President, and assumed the CEO role in 2020 following the passing of founder Leila Janah. Under her leadership, Sama closed a $70M Series B - at the time the largest funding round for a woman-led AI infrastructure company - achieved Forbes AI 50 recognition, and scaled to over 3,000 employees while maintaining its B Corp certification and social mission of lifting people out of poverty through dignified work in the AI economy.
LILT is an enterprise AI platform for multilingual content, built around adaptive machine translation and human-in-the-loop workflows. Founded by former Google Translate researchers Spence Green and John DeNero, it serves global enterprises and government agencies who need translation that learns from feedback rather than starting from scratch every time.
Mursion is a San Francisco-based AI-powered upskilling platform that uses live human 'simulation specialists' to puppet AI avatars in immersive role-play scenarios. Founded in 2015 by Mark Atkinson and Arjun Nagendran, the company trains leaders, salespeople, teachers and healthcare workers in the high-stakes conversations that are hardest to rehearse in real life.
N-Power Medicine is a Redwood City clinical research and technology company building an always-on clinical trial infrastructure inside community oncology practices, combining a real-time registry, AI-enabled tooling, and remote site support to dramatically expand patient access to trials and shorten oncology drug development timelines.
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 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.
Mark Godley is the CEO of LeadGenius, a Berkeley-based B2B data intelligence platform that combines AI with human computation to deliver precision contact data for enterprise go-to-market teams. A self-described C-suite startup junkie with 30 years of SaaS expertise, Godley joined LeadGenius in 2017 — first as President, then stepping into the CEO role — and has driven the company's pivot from a service-heavy model to a scalable SaaS platform serving 400+ enterprise customers across 42 countries including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and Autodesk. Under his leadership, LeadGenius has distinguished itself as the first crowdsourcing company to set a minimum wage tied to the cost of living in each country of operation, building a global decentralized workforce of data researchers while remaining GDPR and CCPA compliant.