Artificial Intelligence (AI) has grown from a niche to a mission-critical technology. The companies have taken on artificial intelligence have, in many cases, prospered and multiplied. A surprisingly good example is the success of DefinedCrowd. It has gone from relative unknown to a globe-spanning artificial intelligence toolkit to the Fortune 500 in just a couple of years. To further fuel its expansion, the company just raised a new $50,5 million B round.
DefinedCrowd does not make artificial intelligence. Nevertheless, it supplies data used to create it, specializing in the processing of natural language. Someone must vet 500 different ways you could ask for the weather, after all. Otherwise, it would be much more difficult for systems of machine learning to tell what users mean. The same works for computer vision, sentiment recognition and other domains for which the company sorts and creates data. DefinedCrowd has a paid community of hundreds of thousands of participants doing this highly necessary and voluminous work.
Artificial Intelligence works its way into everything, from enterprise software to editing and creating media. Thus, there has been no shortage of companies in search of data for training.
Daniela Braga is co-founder of DefinedCrowd. She told TechCrunch that, over the last couple of years, the demand for data had been consistently growing. Moreover, companies are more and more aware of the impact that data has on their systems. Thus, they have been looking for more domains and languages which were not considered five years ago.
The emphasis is on more multilingual deployments, the potential for bias, and inclusivity as drivers of demand. New applications and markets are opening continually. Thus, entrants need high-quality data for developing consumer-ready products.
DefinedCrowd
Braga said that this puts them in a, particularly good position. This is because their data is agnostic. Thus, they can work pretty much around all verticals.
Nevertheless, this is not just wishful thinking. In year-over-year revenue, the company reported a tremendous 656% increase. In that time, they have also nearly tripled the size of their workforce to more than 250.
Braga is expecting to put a great deal of the $50 million round to put towards hiring. Thus, to follow their plan through, they got to have the developers to make the products. This means doubling the employee count, again.
Moreover, Braga noted that she had not noticed a significant downturn in the industry for DefinedCrowd. This is despite the fact of pandemic effects on business or operations. Mostly, this is because product development continued in anticipation of consumers and the needs of the enterprise will return to normal.
She explained that they decided to make their business fully remote before implemented lockdown measures. They transferred all the employees to remote working in a short space of time. Nevertheless, it was a challenging task. However, DefinedCrowd is a global company with four offices in three different countries. The adaptation phase went smoothly. Thus, they could maintain at full speed during the process.
Hermes GPE and Semapa Next were also appended to the increasingly long list of investors. Now the list includes Mastercard, Sony Innovation Fund, Amazon Alexa Fund, IronFire Ventures and many more.
