Sapien has raised $5 million in a seed funding round to accelerate its data labeling business.
The round included contributions from investors such as Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Ravikant Capital, and Yield Guild Games. Sapien will use the funds to enhance its AI to better guide and support data labeling, the company says. The funds will also be used to scale Sapien’s blockchain infrastructure to build a team of human labelers.
“This funding will allow us to expand our team, expand our front-end labeling infrastructure, and deliver better quality data to our growing number of enterprise customers,” Sapien co-founder Trevor Koverko said in a statement Wednesday. “There will be,” he said.
Sapien uses blockchain’s rewards to essentially gamify data labeling, a process essential to advancing AI-based language learning models such as OpenAI’s Chat GPT. Data labeling involves labeling text, images, and various types of files so that machine learning models can interpret and learn from the data.
The data labeling market was valued at $6.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to surge to nearly $75 billion by 2032, according to data labeling company Fact.MR. Meanwhile, the broader artificial intelligence market is expected to grow to $738 billion by 2029, from a value of about $242 billion last year, according to data from Statista.
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About the author
Elizabeth Napolitano is a data reporter covering business and technology news with a focus on cryptocurrency. Before she joined The Block, Elizabeth reported on BigTech, AI, crypto, and video games for CBS Moneywatch. As a CoinDesk reporter, she covered DeFi, NFTs, and US courts. She received a master’s degree in journalism from CUNY. X: Follow her at @LizKNapolitano.