{"id":201347,"date":"2025-10-09T23:51:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T23:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/201347\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T23:51:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T23:51:10","slug":"datacurve-raises-15-million-to-take-on-scale-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/201347\/","title":{"rendered":"Datacurve raises $15 million to take on Scale AI"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As AI companies mature, the fight for high-quality data has become one of the most competitive areas in the industry, launching companies like Mercor, Surge, and, most prominently, Alexandr Wang\u2019s Scale AI. But now that <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/06\/10\/report-meta-taps-scale-ais-alexandr-wang-to-join-new-superintelligence-lab\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Wang has moved on to run AI at Meta<\/a>, many funders see an opening \u2014 and are willing to fund companies with compelling new strategies for collecting training data.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The Y Combinator graduate <a href=\"https:\/\/datacurve.ai\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Datacurve<\/a> is one such company, focusing on high-quality data for software development. On Thursday, the company announced a $15 million Series A round, led by Mark Goldberg at Chemistry with participation from employees at DeepMind, Vercel, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The Series A comes after a $2.7 million seed round, which drew investment from former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Datacurve uses a \u201cbounty hunter\u201d system to attract skilled software engineers to complete the hardest-to-source datasets. The company pays for those contributions, distributing over $1 million in bounties so far.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But co-founder Serena Ge (pictured above with co-founder Charley Lee) says the biggest motivation isn\u2019t financial. For high-value services like software development, the pay will always be far lower for data work than conventional employment \u2014 so the company\u2019s most important edge is a positive user experience.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWe treat this as a consumer product, not a data labeling operation,\u201d Ge said. \u201cWe spend a lot of time thinking about: How can we optimize it so that the people we want are interested and get onto our platform?\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That\u2019s particularly important as the needs of post-training data grow more complex. While earlier models were trained on simple datasets, today\u2019s AI products rely on <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/09\/21\/silicon-valley-bets-big-on-environments-to-train-ai-agents\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">complex RL environments<\/a>, which need to be constructed through specific and strategic data collection. As the environments grow more sophisticated, the data requirements become both more intense for both quantity and quality \u2014 a factor that could give high-quality data collection companies like Datacurve an edge.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As an early-stage company, Datacurve is focused on software engineering, but Ge says the model could apply just as easily to fields like finance, marketing, or even medicine.<\/p>\n<p>Techcrunch event<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cWhat we\u2019re doing right now is we\u2019re creating an infrastructure for post-training data collection that attracts and retains highly competent people in their own domains,\u201d Ge says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As AI companies mature, the fight for high-quality data has become one of the most competitive areas in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,99166,49,48,99167,61,75757],"class_list":{"0":"post-201347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-balaji-srinivasan","12":"tag-ca","13":"tag-canada","14":"tag-datacurve","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-training-data"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}