As AI corporations mature, the combat for high-quality information has turn into one of the crucial aggressive areas within the business, launching corporations like Mercor, Surge, and, most prominently, Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI. However now that Wang has moved on to run AI at Meta, many funders see a gap — and are prepared to fund corporations with compelling new methods for gathering coaching information.

The Y Combinator graduate Datacurve is one such firm, specializing in high-quality information for software program improvement. On Thursday, the corporate introduced a $15 million Collection A spherical, led by Mark Goldberg at Chemistry with participation from workers at DeepMind, Vercel, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The Collection A comes after a $2.7 million seed spherical, which drew funding from former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

Datacurve makes use of a “bounty hunter” system to draw expert software program engineers to finish the hardest-to-source datasets. The corporate pays for these contributions, distributing over $1 million in bounties to this point.

However co-founder Serena Ge (pictured above with co-founder Charley Lee) says the most important motivation isn’t monetary. For top-value companies like software program improvement, the pay will all the time be far decrease for information work than standard employment — so the corporate’s most essential edge is a constructive person expertise.

“We deal with this as a shopper product, not a knowledge labeling operation,” Ge stated. “We spend a variety of time fascinated about: How can we optimize it in order that the individuals we would like have an interest and get onto our platform?”

That’s significantly essential because the wants of post-training information develop extra advanced. Whereas earlier fashions had been educated on easy datasets, right this moment’s AI merchandise depend on advanced RL environments, which must be constructed via particular and strategic information assortment. Because the environments develop extra refined, the info necessities turn into each extra intense for each amount and high quality — an element that might give high-quality information assortment corporations like Datacurve an edge.

As an early-stage firm, Datacurve is targeted on software program engineering, however Ge says the mannequin may apply simply as simply to fields like finance, advertising and marketing, and even drugs.

“What we’re doing proper now could be we’re creating an infrastructure for post-training information assortment that draws and retains extremely competent individuals in their very own domains,” Ge says.