Sapien io A Decentralized Data Foundry Raises $10.5M 🔥 @PlaySapien

Data is the biggest opportunity in AI.

Today, enterprises turn to centralized data facilities that earn billions in revenue by employing millions of humans to create and structure data to fuel their models.

But it’s not enough. In-person data facilities can’t scale to employ the billions of humans needed to meet demand. Nor can they attract experts in specialized fields, who are needed to produce high-quality data to progress AI to human-level reasoning.

Sapien has raised $10.5 million in seed funding, led by Variant, to solve this problem. Sapien is a human-powered data foundry that matches enterprise AI models with a decentralized network of AI Workers who get paid to produce data from their phones. On Sapien, AI Workers are matched with optimal data tasks based on their skills and preferences.

Why Decentralize AI Workers

Scalability: Data farms use humans to check humans. Sapien uses onchain incentives to reward quality automatically—unlocking global scale while keeping synthetic-data-producing bots out.

Quality: A global pool of diverse AI Workers reduces localized biases, resulting in higher-quality data. This has established a network effect for Sapien and a data moat for our customers.

Onchain payments: Sapien’s global payment integrations ensure AI Workers get paid instantly with negligible fees—a sharp contrast to vendors today, who often hold pay for weeks to police quality.

Gamification: If data labeling is fun, engaging, and even competitive, more people will want to participate. So we gamified the entire experience to make work feel like play.