Snorkel AI, which helps AI labs and enterprises build training datasets and simulated environments, has raised a $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Insight Partners and S32, with existing investors Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV and Wells Fargo participating. The valuation is nearly triple the $1.3 billion the company reached in its $100 million Series D 17 months ago.
Snorkel began by offering software to automate data labeling but shifted last year to delivering completed datasets through a data-as-a-service model. Rather than operating purely as an expert marketplace, it combines its own software and models to generate synthetic data alongside subject matter experts, and it also sells reinforcement learning environments.
The company said its annualized revenue run rate has reached $375 million, an eighteenfold rise over the past year, driven by AI labs’ demand for high-quality training data. Because it sells datasets rather than human labor, Snorkel said payments to its experts are recorded as cost of goods sold, unlike rivals such as Mercor, Handshake and Micro1, whose headline gross figures include large payouts to contractors.
Snorkel launched commercially in 2019 after four years of research by co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner and his team at a Stanford AI lab.
