Snorkel AI, a US-based provider of artificial intelligence development software, secured $85m on Monday in a series C round that included GV, a corporate venturing subsidiary of internet and technology group Alphabet.
Venture capital firm Addition led the round, which was also backed by Greylock, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nepenthe Capital, Walden International and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock.
Founded in 2019, Snorkel provides software that utilises programmatic labelling to help users build and label training data for AI and machine learning products. Its technology emerged from the Snorkel Research Project, which was launched at Stanford University’s AI Lab in 2015.
The round valued the startup at $1bn and hiked its overall funding to $135m. It had emerged from stealth in July 2020 with $15m in series A funding from GV, Greylock and In-Q-Tel.
Lightspeed Venture Partners led Snorkel’s $35m series B round in April this year, investing alongside GV, Greylock, In-Q-Tel, Nepenthe Capital, Walden International and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock.
Snorkel AI’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Ratner, said: “We are incredibly excited by the value Snorkel Flow has driven for our enterprise customers by enabling them to adopt a programmatic, datacentric approach to AI, taking projects previously blocked on the data to production value in days.
“This new series C funding will enable us to accelerate the pace of our product development even further and to bring Snorkel Flow to even more domains and use cases.”
