This AI startup has just raised 10.5 million USD from Animoca Brands!
Today (30/10), an AI startup named Sapien announced the successful raising of 10.5 million USD in a seed round led by Variant.
This funding round also features other investors such as Animoca Brands, Primitive Ventures, Yield Guild Games (YGG), and HF0, along with some individual investors like Gabby Dizon (founder of Yield Guild Games) and Kevin Jiang (former member of the Softbank Vision Fund).
Sapien stated that the project intends to use the newly raised funds to enhance AI technology, better support data labeling operations. The project also plans to upgrade blockchain infrastructure to further develop human labeling methods.
Sapien allows users participating in the platform to earn money by labeling data - an essential process to promote famous AI models like ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini (Google), ...
Data labeling involves providing information about texts, images, and various types of files so that Machine Learning models can interpret and learn from this data. The data labeling market reached approximately 6.8 billion USD in 2021 and is expected to grow more than 10 times to nearly 75 billion USD by 2032 - according to Fact MR.
The statistics company Statista predicts that the broader artificial intelligence (AI) market could reach a scale of 738 billion USD by 2029 - tripling from the figure of 242 billion USD in 2023.
The development team of Sapien includes some notable members such as: Rowan Stone (co-founder of Layer 2 Base of Coinbase exchange) and Trevor Koverko (founder of Polymath and author of the RWA ERC1400 standard).
Trevor Koverko (co-founder of Sapien) said: “The newly raised funds will allow us to expand the development team, upgrade the infrastructure and user interface, as well as provide better quality data for the company's growing list of enterprise customers.”
Rowan Stone (CEO of Sapien) shared in an interview: “If users contribute value, they will be paid extra for being useful to the Sapien platform. Conversely, if they perform poorly (or engage in fraud, use bots, ...), we have methods to recover those rewards.”
Sapien is currently striving to address data issues for 17 major business partners, including top Chinese technology corporations like Alibaba and Baidu. Currently, Sapien's AI platform has also attracted over 100,000 users.