AI training data firm Snorkel AI triples valuation to $3.5B
Snorkel AI has raised a $350 million Series E round, tripling its valuation to $3.5 billion as AI labs' demand for high-quality training data surges. The company's annualized revenue run-rate has grown 18-fold over the past year to $375 million.
Snorkel AI, a seven-year-old startup that helps AI labs and corporations build training data sets and simulated environments, has closed a $350 million Series E round at a $3.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Insight Partners and S32, pushing the company's valuation to nearly triple the $1.3 billion it achieved 17 months ago in a $100 million Series D. Existing investors including Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo also joined the round.
From data labeling to complete data sets
Snorkel originally offered software for automating data labeling but pivoted last year toward supplying customers with fully completed data sets, an approach it calls data-as-a-service. Rather than functioning purely as a marketplace for human experts, the company combines its own software and models for synthetic data generation with input from subject matter specialists.
Snorkel says its annualized revenue run-rate now stands at $375 million, an 18-fold jump over the past 12 months. That surge reflects the growing appetite among AI labs for high-quality training data.
Broader industry growth
Other companies positioning themselves as AI data labs have reported similarly explosive growth. Mercor's gross annualized revenue has reached $2 billion, Handshake passed the $1 billion mark earlier this year, and Micro1 has scaled to $500 million. Because these companies typically pass on roughly 60% to 70% of their top-line revenue directly to the domain specialists performing the work, their actual net revenue is substantially lower than the headline figures suggest.
Snorkel's situation differs in that it sells reinforcement learning environments and finished data sets rather than human labor directly, meaning payments to its experts are recorded as cost of goods sold rather than folded into its headline revenue figure.
Snorkel launched commercially in 2019, following four years of research led by co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner and his team at a Stanford University AI lab.
