Scale AI competitor Micro1 raising funds at $500 million valuation, sources say
Micro1 provides data labelling services to artificial intelligence labs, a sector that has grown tremendously in recent years as high-quality, human-generated datasets have become more important in training advanced AI systems. Micro1 has capitalised on this trend by building an AI-powered recruitment engine enabling AI labs to target specialised experts instead of large pools of low-wage labour.
The company has told investors it has crossed $50 million in annualised revenue, up from $10 million earlier this year, and is projecting it will cross $100 million in annualised revenue by the end of September, the sources said. Former Twitter COO Adam Bain joined its board recently, and venture capital firms 01A and LG Technology Ventures will invest in the round, the sources said.
Micro1 has benefited from recent changes at San Francisco-based Scale AI, a data labelling company that provides infrastructure and services to help organisations accelerate the development of AI models. Scale AI recently lost customers after Meta Platforms poached its CEO, Alexandr Wang, to become Meta's chief AI officer, leading Meta's new Superintelligence Labs.
Among the customers that have left or are planning to leave Scale AI are Alphabet's Google and OpenAI, which are planning to move away over concerns that doing business with Scale could expose their research priorities to Meta.
Another Scale AI competitor, Surge AI, is raising up to $1 billion, and raked in over $1 billion in revenue last year.
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