Intelligent data platform for AI and Machine Learning DefinedCrowd raises €10.1 million in a Series A round to further expand its product and team.
Based in Seattle and with an R&D center in Lisbon, DefinedCrowd was founded in 2015 by Portuguese entrepreneur Daniela Braga, and the startup is still partnered with Portugal Ventures and Startup Lisboa.
This new capital secured in this Series A round will be used to develop DefinedCrowd’s product offerings, expand the team, and rapidly increase market-share globally.
Daniela Braga
“This is a super important milestone for any startup. I am very honored that we were Series A ready in less than three years thanks to our incredible market validation,” said Braga.
“With this funding, we’ll be able to continue growing our products, both the enterprise portal and Neevo. We will continue to execute on our machine learning roadmap, which makes us unique, and we will expand our world class technical sales team in order to serve our global clients even better,” she added in a statement.
It all started for DefinedCrowd back in 2015, when the team decided to leave their corporate jobs and create their own business. With a little more than an idea, they joined Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Seattle and closed a $200k pre-seed investment over lunch.
After working in China and being established in the USA, Braga saw Portugal as a natural place to establish the R&D center, because she could make this initial investment last longer and find here valuable talent. The company was however incorporated in Seattle, Washington.
A phD, years of research and experience working in companies that use these technologies, made Braga identify the trend, recognize the need and understand how to stand out from competition being more efficient and secure for companies.
The Series A was led by New-York and Zurich-based Evolution Equity Partners, and the round also brought in Kibo Ventures, Mastercard and EDP (Energias de Portugal) as new investors, along with additional capital from current investors Sony, Portugal Ventures, Amazon, and Busy Angels.
Dennis Smith
“Evolution Equity Partners is honored to lead this growth-targeted Series A round that comes at an inflection point for DefinedCrowd to manage its triple digit revenue growth trajectory and customer on-boarding globally,” said Dennis Smith, Founder and Managing Partner at Evolution Equity Partners and the newest member of DefinedCrowd’s Board of Directors.
“DefinedCrowd’s SaaS platform has very quickly positioned the company as an innovative leader to solve AI/ML’s global most pressing problem, the need for continuous access to highly accurate data,” he added.
DefinedCrowd is a next-generation data science company focused on building data refinery platforms for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It combines crowdsourcing and machine learning capabilities to accelerate enterprise data training and modeling.
With expertise in speech and natural language technologies, the DefinedCrowd platform leverages machine learning, data science and modern crowdsourcing to enable enterprises easily manage their global data collection and enrichment programs.
In 2016 DefinedCrowd raised $1.1 million from Amazon, Sony and Portugal Ventures, and it became the first startup invested by Sony’s Innovation Fund and the first company funded by Amazon without using an Amazon technology.
Read More: How DefinedCrowd just closed a $1.1M seed from Amazon, Sony and Portugal Ventures
The company also offers capabilities in 46 languages, supported by their own community, Neevo by DefinedCrowd, which consists of over 45,000 skilled members worldwide.
Through a combination of human intelligence, automatic tools, and machine learning capabilities, DefinedCrowd’s platform allows data scientists to collect, structure, and enrich training data through efficient workflows designed to accelerate enterprise AI initiatives.