Snorkel AI Valuation Nearly Triples to $3.5B as AI Training Data Demand Surges

Snorkel AI has raised a $350 million Series E, pushing its valuation to $3.5 billion - close to triple the $1.3 billion it reached 17 months ago with a $100 million Series D.

Insight Partners and S32 led the round, with existing backers Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo also participating.

The seven-year-old startup began with software for automating data labeling, then shifted last year to selling completed data sets, an offering it calls data-as-a-service. Its approach blends software and models that generate synthetic data with subject matter experts, rather than relying solely on a human marketplace.

Snorkel reports its annualized revenue run-rate has reached $375 million, an 18-fold jump over 12 months, driven by AI labs' appetite for high-end training data.

Other AI data companies have seen similar growth: Mercor's gross annualized revenue hit $2 billion, Handshake crossed $1 billion earlier this year, and Micro1 scaled to $500 million. Because those firms pay out roughly 60% to 70% of top-line income to domain specialists, their net annual revenue is substantially lower than headline gross figures. Snorkel says that since it sells reinforcement learning environments and complete datasets rather than human labor, payments to its experts sit in cost of goods sold rather than annualized revenue.

Snorkel launched commercially in 2019 after four years of research by co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner and his team at a Stanford AI lab.

Source: TechCrunch