AI training data provider Wirestock raises $23M in funding - SiliconANGLE

AI training data provider Wirestock raises $23M in funding

Wirestock Inc., a startup that provides multimodal training datasets for artificial intelligence developers, has raised $23 million in funding.

TechCrunch reported today that early-stage fund Nava Ventures led the investment. It was joined by SBVP, Formula VC and I2BF Ventures. Wirestock has raised a total of $26 million in external funding to date.

Wirestock launched in 2018 with a platform that helped photographers and other creative professionals distribute their images through stock image services. Earlier this year, the company announced a pivot to providing training datasets for AI projects. It offers model developers access to a catalog of more than 50 million images and videos created by about 700,000 users.

The company also sells custom training datasets. According to Wirestock’s website, one of its specialties is recording footage that demonstrates how users interact with applications. A startup with an AI-powered website design tool could commission images that show how to edit interface elements in Figma.

According to TechCrunch, Wirestock’s annualized revenue topped $40 million prior to its funding round. The company’s growth may partly be driven by the surging industry interest in world models. Startups developing world models, which are trained on visual datasets, have raised billions of dollars in funding over the past year.

Much of the capital has gone to two companies. World Labs Inc., which is led by pioneering AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion in February from a consortium that included Nvidia Corp. It’s developing world models that can be used for tasks such as training robots. Rival AMI Labs Inc. closed a $1.03 billion round around the same time to build world models that can automate hardware engineering tasks.

Visual datasets of the kind sold by Wirestock can also be used to train computer use models. Standard Intelligence Inc., a startup that raised $75 million last month, used footage of users performing tasks in applications to build an algorithm called FDM-1. It says that the AI can automate multistep business tasks in a more hardware-efficient manner than earlier models.

Wirestock will reportedly use its capital to recruit more AI researchers, engineers and other technical professionals. The new hires will help the company develop a software product that will enable “enterprise AI labs to collaborate on datasets.” It’s also considering expanding its focus beyond images and videos to other types of training data.

The company’s funding round comes a few weeks after another AI data provider closed a $30 million investment of its own. San Francisco-based AfterQuery sells datasets that comprise AI prompts, user-created replies to the prompts and a step-by-step overview of the thought process behind each response. Those explanations enable AI models to hone their reasoning capabilities.

Image: Wirestock