Labelbox Raises $3.9 Million in Seed Funding Led by Kleiner Perkins to Advance its Platform for Adapting and Training Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise

Labelbox, a data labeling platform for enterprises to easily train expert machine learning applications, today announced that it has raised $3.9 million in Seed financing, led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from First Round Capital and Google’s new AI fund, Gradient Ventures. The funding will be used to accelerate the development of its technology platform for building and maintaining in-house machine learning infrastructure, and to further expand Labelbox’s go-to-market strategy.

With Labelbox, founders Manu Sharma, Ysiad Ferreiras, Daniel Rasmuson, and Brian Rieger set out to create a visual workflow interface and system of record for the data labeling process, which is still largely carried about by humans and is costly in terms of time and dollars. The founders experienced firsthand the pain of trying to rely on developing and maintaining in-house tools that eased this process, and also the acceleration and benefits of having a really good one.

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Labelbox’s interface provides users the ability to import new datasets, create and manage labeling tasks, and administer the way they are assigned to labelers. The product also includes quality control functionality and performance analytics. Labelbox’s performance analytics dashboard helps customers identify high and low performing labelers, and compare sources of labor against one another to choose the optimal provider.

“The continued adoption of artificial intelligence applications in the enterprise is driving increasing demand for the creation of large, labeled data sets necessary to train them,” said Ilya Fushman, General Partner at Kleiner Perkins. “The team at Labelbox is fundamentally transforming how data-rich businesses can maintain quality and consistency in-house and when the labeling process is critical.”

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“It’s our mission to power the next generation of products and services for enterprises to rapidly build artificial intelligence, while allowing them to maintain full control of their data,” said Manu Sharma, co-founder and CEO of Labelbox. We are thrilled to partner with the teams at Kleiner Perkins, First Round, and Gradient to streamline the challenges of crafting and scaling a well-orchestrated labeling process.”

This includes automation of tasks where possible, sophisticated data versioning and metadata management, and feedback on the training process based on the output of the models a customer feeds its data into. Today, Labelbox is providing a more data-driven experience to its customers across the startup and enterprise ecosystem, including Conde Nast, Lytx and Genius Sports.

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