Encord Lands $60 Million Series C

<p><strong><span class&equals;"legendSpanClass">SAN FRANCISCO<&sol;span><&sol;strong> &&num;8212&semi; Encord&comma; a data infrastructure company for physical AI&comma; has announced a &dollar;60 million Series C led by Wellington Management&comma; bringing the company&&num;8217&semi;s total funding to &dollar;110 million&period; Existing investors Y Combinator&comma; CRV&comma; N47&comma; Crane Venture Partners and Harpoon Ventures also participated in the round alongside new investors Bright Pixel Capital and Isomer Capital&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>The investment will help Encord scale its AI-native data infrastructure platform&comma; which helps AI teams manage&comma; curate&comma; annotate&comma; and align the multimodal data that physical AI systems depend on&comma; including audio&comma; video&comma; images&comma; sensor data&comma; 3D point clouds and other formats that legacy data platforms weren&&num;8217&semi;t built to handle&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<div class&equals;"pull-right inline-gallery-container col-md-8 col-sm-7 col-xs-12">&NewLine;<div class&equals;"row">&NewLine;<div class&equals;"col-sm-12">&NewLine;<aside class&equals;"pull-quote">Encord&&num;8217&semi;s AI-native data infrastructure manages&comma; curates&comma; annotates&comma; and aligns multimodal data for physical AI systems&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<&sol;aside>&NewLine;<&sol;div>&NewLine;<&sol;div>&NewLine;<&sol;div>&NewLine;<p>Encord works with over 300 AI teams globally&comma; including Woven by Toyota&comma; Skydio&comma; AXA Financial and numerous physical AI and frontier labs&period; The company has seen significant growth in both revenue and data volume on its platform in the last twelve months as a result of the surge in physical AI&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Encord&&num;8217&semi;s Series C comes as physical AI &&num;8211&semi; which powers robots&comma; autonomous vehicles&comma; drones&comma; and other systems that operate in the real world &&num;8211&semi; enters an explosive new growth stage&period; After years of lab demos and pilot programs&comma; these systems are moving into production&period; Analysts project that over 400 million AI robots will come online in just the next 4 years&comma; and that the size of the physical AI industry will eclipse &dollar;30B over the same time period&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>Unlike large language models&comma; which were trained on the open internet&comma; physical AI models must learn from proprietary data&comma; including sensor feeds&comma; video&comma; robotic telemetry&comma; edge cases captured in the field and other sources&period; Storing and processing this data requires more computational power than storing and processing text&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>That data doesn&&num;8217&semi;t organize itself&period; Getting the right data into the models and keeping the wrong data out—continuously&comma; at scale—requires purpose-built AI-native data infrastructure&period;<&sol;p>&NewLine;<p>&&num;8220&semi;Everyone is focused on building bigger models&comma;&&num;8221&semi; said Ulrik Stig Hansen&comma; Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Encord&period; &&num;8220&semi;But for physical AI&comma; the bottleneck isn&&num;8217&semi;t model size&period; It&&num;8217&semi;s data readiness&period; You can have the most sophisticated model in the world&comma; and it will still fail if the data feeding it is incomplete&comma; inconsistent&comma; or misaligned with real-world conditions&period; That&&num;8217&semi;s the problem we solve&period;&&num;8221&semi;<&sol;p>&NewLine;

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