California-based data-centric artificial intelligence platform Snorkel AI announced Monday, August 9, 2021, that it had successfully raised $85 million in a Series C investment round. Following the fresh round of funding, the company is now valued at $1 billion, reveals Fortune.
Founded in 2019, Snorkel AI is a data labeling startup that is formed by a team from Stanford AI Lab alongside engineers from the tech industry hailing from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia, states Venture Beat.
Snorkel AI specializes in providing clients with data labeling services. It leverages machine learning systems to facilitate an easier and more efficient labeling process for documents by training datasets via artificial intelligence.
Through its platform, the startup says in its press release that it is able to “eliminat[e] the need to hand label data which is notoriously expensive and inefficient.” It counts Fortune 50 companies and various government agencies in the United States as some of its clients, including Apple, Intel, and Stanford Medicine, reveals Fortune.
According to Fortune, the Series C financing round was led both by Addition, a venture capital firm, and BlackRock, an investment company.
In addition to the aforementioned investors, other companies took part in the said funding round. These include Greylock, GV (previously Google Ventures), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nepenthe, and Walden.
The Series C funding round brings Snorkel AI’s total amount raised to $135 million, bringing the company’s valuation to $1 billion. Based on its press release, the California startup said that it is one of the few companies to successfully reach the one billion valuation mark in just two years.
Prior to this funding round, the data labeling platform was able to successfully raise $35 million in a Series B investment round. The financing round was then led by Lightspeed, shares Venture Beat.
Following the fresh round of funding, Snorkel AI plans to add more people to its engineering team, reports Venture Beat.
In a statement, chief executive officer of Snorkel AI Alex Ratner said, “We’re incredibly excited by the value Snorkel has driven for our enterprise customers by enabling them to adopt a programmatic, date-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 to even more domains and use cases,” continued Ratner in his statement.
