Snorkel AI, a startup specialising in building training data sets and simulated environments for AI labs and corporations, has raised $350 million in a Series E funding round. This new investment has increased the company's valuation to $3.5 billion.
The latest funding round, led by Insight Partners and S32, values the seven-year-old startup at nearly three times its $1.3 billion valuation from 17 months ago, when it secured $100 million in Series D funding. Existing investors, including Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo, also participated.
Snorkel AI, which launched commercially in 2019 after four years of research at a Stanford AI lab, shifted its approach last year to offer completed data sets, a service it terms data-as-a-service. The company uses a hybrid method, combining its software and models to generate synthetic data with the input of subject matter experts.
The company reports its current annualized revenue run-rate at $375 million, an 18-fold increase over the last 12 months. This growth is attributed to the demand for high-end training data from AI labs.