Rapidata receives 8.5 million dollars in seed capital

(CONNECT) Rapidata has closed a seed financing round with 8.5 million dollars. The round was led by Canaan Partners from Stamford in the US state of Connecticut and IA Ventures from New York. According to a press release, the venture capital companies Acequia from Seattle in the US state of Washington and BlueYard from Berlin have also participated.

Rapidata addresses one of the biggest bottlenecks in the development of artificial intelligence (AI): AI tools and systems such as Chat GPT, autonomous driving or Magic Erase rely on huge amounts of data. This data is filtered, annotated and validated by enormous amounts of repetitive human labor in low-wage countries.

The Zurich-based start-up, founded in 2023, solves this problem by not relying on permanent employees, but instead has a network of millions of people around the world who can be contacted using the same technology used for digital advertising. According to Rapidata, this enables it to offer data processing that is a thousand times faster and verified by humans. This is both more cost-effective than the competition and also enables human-in-the-loop capabilities for generative AI. This reduces feedback times from weeks to hours and lowers the cost of training AI models.

According to co-founder and CEO Jason Corkill, the win at the Schlieren-based start-up promoter Venture Kick provided his company with the financial basis to develop its platform. The funding program gave Rapidata the right focus at an early stage. Perhaps most importantly, "by participating in Venture Kick, we also came into contact with a number of external investors, which was helpful in organizing this financing round". ce/mm